I may be in the minority but I don't carry a ditch kit at all in the Q or BWCA in the summer when I'm travelling with a group. I do pay a lot of attention to making sure my most essential survival gear is in peak form though, and I know it's always going to be on hand no matter the situation:  my brain.

Other than that, I have a lighter, swiss army knife, water tabs and some hand sanitizer in my pocket (along with lint, most likely). I can survive for days with just that stuff. Probably not as comfortably as some of you with the ditch kits, but I'll manage. Water's all around and I've spent 50+ years slowly accumulating an emergency store of calories around my midsection, but there's usually lots to eat in the woods/water also if you know what you're looking for. As long as I can make fire and construct a crude windbreak, I'm pretty bulletproof. Several planes fly over on a daily basis and there's plenty of bare ledge-rock to construct a crude SOS out of rocks. A signal mirror is good but a fire, and/or running around like a fool in front of my SOS is almost as good.

Not trying to steer you away from anything, but it's easy to get caught up in hypotheticals that have almost a zero% chance of occurring and end up with a lot of crap dangling off your person that you'll just never need. I guess I figure if I'm hurt bad enough for a lot of that survival stuff to be essential then there's a pretty good chance I am too hurt to deploy it effectively.