I think what you breathe pre-dive is almost irrelevant. The real kicker is what you breathe during the dive, and that's always going to be gas under pressure. The levels of gas in your blood go up very quickly. Recreational divers can only afford ~10-20 minutes at 30m depths before they need to decompress. And that doesn't even count as "deep".
You can't breathe pure oxygen under water, as it becomes very toxic very quickly as pressure goes up. So you have to dilute it with something. Nitrogen is easy to get hold of (actually you just compress atmospheric air). I'm also not sure cutting nitrogen out helps much with decompression sickness, you get it with other gases too - maybe more slowly, I'm not sure.
You can, and do, replace nitrogen with other gases, mostly helium (and in rare circumstances, hydrogen), but for other reasons. Nitrogen too becomes toxic under pressure, around the 30-40m mark, with symptoms similar to drunkenness - not good under water.
Funnily enough, helium does the same deeper down, except the symptoms there are the opposite - nervousness, tension etc. So to some extent perhaps these two balance out. Hydrogen has very low toxicity, but for some reason people feel queasy about mixing pure hydrogen and oxygen.
Crucially, too, a lot of deep diving is commercial in nature, and cost-sensitive. Anything that isn't just compressed and bottled air is getting very expensive very quickly.
It all gets incredibly complicated. Deep enough, you need to breathe gas that contains so little oxygen that you would suffocate on it at surface pressure. At pressure, it's fine - the partial pressure of oxygen is sufficient, and having less of it makes it less toxic. But you have to be careful to only use this gas deep enough, else you'll run out of oxygen. Or at other times, when decompressing, you might use an oxygen-rich mix, which while more toxic, helps you purge some of the other gases from your bloodstream, cutting decompression times.
It's a fascinating topic to read about from the comfort of my sofa.