but free dropping to swim to a vessel seems utterly pointless.
Opinions differ on this, crab... a dead-in-the-water sailboat or a shrimper in a significant seaway is a challenging winch target... not to say I disagree with you, but some would (in some contexts I would disagree with you, but not all). I hated winching to sailboats worse than sin, personally, with shrimpers a close second. A free fall to swim to a raft is fairly sound and a most efficient business.
A free fall (by the way our procedures were written when I was active) is only done in daylight and only from 15' or below... the interpretation of which often led to its use in extremely high seas such as Alaska or Hawaii, where the risk of swimmer injury was deemed to be
less in a free fall than being lowered on a cable that couldn't possibly keep the feed rate to match the wave motion... the caveat is... the timing has to be just right to hit the crest of the wave or the risk is
increased as the swimmer falls in pursuit of the falling sea to pancake in the trough. I suspect that's an unpleasant way to end up in a wheelchair or die.
I think part of the procedural differences between organizations is environmental and specific to historical cases where lives were lost. We seem to go around on this sort of thing on every SAR thread. But, I think that's natural, and probably healthy for debate.
BTW, in USCG parlance, the guy who goes out on the wire is called a rescue swimmer, regardless of what task it is that he's actually doing at the time (which may be confusing), be it on a cable on a cliffside, on a cable into a surfline using a quick strop (which we did indeed steal from the Brits), or winching to a vessel of whatever type to render first aid (all swimmers are EMTs), or swimming to a target in the water. They have a very large and deep bag of tricks indeed, and which ones are used is dependent upon a crew interaction between the cockpit crew, the hoist operator, and the swimmer. The swimmer has veto authority over any decision, as does the PIC.