A lot of equipment isn't needed constantly. It's that one time it comes in handy and you're very glad you had it.
Sure. I can come up with all sorts of scenarios where we would be better off it we had on our boat:
A rail-launched, self-righting lifeboat similar to what is carried on the sterns of ships these days.
A few auto-deploy liferafts with canopy and survival gear and provisions for a week or two.
Survival suits for every person on the boat.
A parachute drogue.
A collision mat.
An EPERB
A personal locator for every person on the boat to wear at all times.
But somehow I don't think any of this with perhaps the exception of the EPERB is really relevant to the boating we do on the inside waters of NW Washington and BC.
If we made regular trips across to Hawaii or the southwestern Pacific or Asia, sure, a lot of that list would become very relevant.
One of the things I often find amusing on forums like this is the armchair-theorizing about all kinds of disastrous things that could happen and all the equipment one needs to be ready for it. There is very often an extreme disconnect between the theorizing and the reality of recreational boating.
The implication that if one is going to take a boat up the Inside Passage to Alaska, for example, one needs a veritable barge-load of safety equipment in order to have any hope of surviving the trip is totally unrealistic. I think the armchair crowd would be somewhat shocked to see the kinds of boats and the way they are outfitted that make this run on a regular or seasonal basis with no disastrous events of any kind and no need for all the whiz-bang equipment so many people seem to think one should have before even contemplating leaving their home slip.
Could real bad things happen? Of course. A person could have a grand piano fall on them as they walk down a city street, too. Life is a constant appraisal of risk and reality and making judgements and subsequent decisions accordingly. Some people assume every possible bad thing is going to happen to them, some think nothing bad will ever happen to them, and some have the ability to make rational and logical risk assessments based on reality.
AIS is a terrific tool if you need it. If you don't need it, you don't need it. The fact that it exists does not mean that boating without one is deadly dangerous. So far we have not needed it. If the day comes that we do need it, we'll get it. But so far we've not encountered a scenario
in our boating in our region where an AIS would have made a lick of difference in what we did with the boat or how we did it.
I'm not anti-AIS. I simply see no need to buy something I currently don't need. Like a rail-launched, self-righting lifeboat on our stern. It would be way cool to have one, but I rather doubt we'd ever need it unless our boat was attacked by a really pissed off sperm whale.....