Sorry to miss the call-out; I must have been too deep in a snow hole with my cheese platter. But I did get a good laugh out of it.
Generally, everyone above has outlined the good reasons. The first Level 1 I took scared the hell out of me, and was taught by old school touring science dorks who had 1. tons of experience and 2. very little ability to apply their snow science to how skiing was changing. The second Level 1 was operational focused, for a cat ski operation, and it was a good lap back through, but it again showed me how much I didn't know. I've since taken the old Level 2, and the new Pro 1 Bridge, both from AAI. It's been interesting, informative, and I've come away from all of it a smarter, more humble, better backcountry user.
Teaching a Level 1 last year was an interesting experience. On one hand, I had a silly kind of nervousness which said "what are you doing teaching this stuff? You don't know it THAT well." And on the other, I did know, because Level 1 ain't that advanced. And it went really well teaching it--our students learned, grew in their knowledge and application, and most left feeling like their wishes for the course were fulfilled.
Since it's the entry point to formalized avalanche education, folks come to a Level 1 with such different abilities and expectations. Sometimes it's a person with years of experience who has finally been shamed into it by their partners. More frequently, it's a new group of people who haven't seen much natural snow--this second group is going to struggle some no matter how they do it; those that come in with some knowledge from reading or taking a companion rescue course have a leg up, obviously.
One of the keys for me is that there is so, so much to the avalanche world. People dedicate five decade long careers to the study of snow and how it moves, and there are still huge gaps in what we know about how it behaves. For fucks sake--standardized assessment protocol involves hitting columns of snow with your hand. That's pretty Cro-magnon from a modernity perspective. So the real art of designing and offering a good level one is deciding what to include, maybe more importantly what to leave out, and then how best to fit that into a three day course that can't answer everything, but leaves people with a decent sense of direction and how to not get killed. Add in all the differences in learning style plus the range of risk tolerance plus the variance in experience--it's a tall order.
Perhaps the formalized avalanche education system, as we do it in the states, doesn't emphasize enough the role of continued learning and practice. We say, "I took my Level 1", but if that was two years ago and you haven't practiced companion rescue since, you're probably not going to be fast enough. That's a simple fact. Last year, the cheap, one day companion rescue class that was offered locally had nobody sign up for it. Literally no one. So we probably need to make it a little more like a WFA or WFR license, where it expires and you have to recert it. Or find some other way to make continuing education a more integral part of the process--that could be as simple as hiring a guide for a day and having them critique your systems, analysis, and strategy.
Level 1 is just a starting point in a long, long learning process. Can you get all the same tools and knowledge via hard knocks and youtube? Sure. But since most people can't learn that way, and the consequences for a minor error can be catastrophic, I think there's still a real need for Level 1.
