FinnG

My guess would be that the Oceangate ship ignores everything that it's not 'expecting' to hear. I don't really know anything about deep sea exploration, but having general purpose microphones in the water seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the marginal cost of having them.

I do totally understand what you mean, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea this swiftly. This is effectively a dictatorship vs democracy argument. I tend to suspect that neither solution would provide exactly what you wanted unless you were the dictator!

If you accept that premise, the decision has to be: which system would serve the most people the best? I'm inclined to think that a team with a budget of $20M would probably get the closest.