If that's your reason for posting your answers I hardly feel your answers are useful to anyone.
I guess I may have missed the fact in your OP that you have '22 years of expreience' and, as such, 'are not a beginner' and are "trying to do the right thing." and as such this is not a question being asked by an electrician with much less experience.
Then, with the experience that you have, why would it appear that you are asking if you need to provide GFCI protection? Again, at this rick of offending you as one of the other posters electricguy61 stated "Ask yourself: would I want my family swimming in an old pool w/ old equipment that wasn't GFI/GFCI protected?" Which I think is an excellent answer.
I would consider this a non-issue and do the right thing and supply GFCI protection regardless calling it a day.
I may have not have posed my question back to you as tactfully as I could have as I certainly didn't anticipate that you would be offended and it wasn?t never my intent to attack your ego by asking some pointed questions in the process of trying to sort out the real reason for the inquiry. It just didn't make sense to me from my perspective. My questions were directed to the possible reasons as to why you were looking for a way to justify not providing GFCI protection. Your inquiry stated "On this existing installation, that was code compliant when installed, can I replace the old breakers with ones that are non-GFCI or am I required to replace them with GFCI breakers because that is what is required today." Why wouldn't you provide GFCI protection regardless in this application? If you did privide a GFCI would the additional cost be coming out of your pocket? If not it should be a non-issue to provide the GFCI protection wouldn't it?
I am really am not interested in your feelings but I am only interested in assuring that I am able to provide an accurate aswer to your inquiry as I would interprete it to prevent placing your customer?s safety at risk and you are not held liable. People do like to take you to court and take as much money as they can from you.
Again, please take electricguy61?s advice and forget about all of this, bit the bullet and just supply the GFCI protection.
In any event, please accept my sincere apology if I offended you as that wasn?t my intent by any means.