Riptard kool-aide: 3x5 is so magic that if you do more reps than that it's totez dangerous and ineffective and if you do less reps than that you need to decrease the weight by 10%; squats are a hamstring exercise and shooting your bum up into the air is what your glutes are good at; if you do more than 1x5 deadlifts you'll burn out; upper back exercises exist only to make your bench press improve and not because training your upper back is a good idea in its own right; rows and RDL's aren't useful if you're a beginner; if you gain 10lb in your first two weeks of barely training it will be lean; if you aren't stronger this week than last week it's probably because you aren't eating enough and not because the body has limited adaptation capabilities; you definitely need to build a strength base before you ever do any intentional hypertrophy training even though strength is the product (not cause) of muscle mass.
If you follow the program by the book, you'll end up with needlessly disproportionate adaptations. If you take what's good about it and modify what's not so great, you'd better not mention it to anyone (especially anyone on the internet) or else you will be condemned by the most damning 5-letter acronym: YNDTP. You'd be better off committing treason -- people will respect you more for it.
140/100/180 kool-aide: These aren't really PTC standards, even though they were used in one PTC program. They were around long before PTC, and they were just as arbitrary then. They're good goals to chase after, but they tell literally nothing about how much you've progressed or what sort of programming will be best for you. It doesn't factor in natural talent/genetic variance or competence. So everything that matters for building a context into which we could coach or program someone's training is ignored. So, while they are great achievements to make, they are essentially meaningless, until we go ahead and ascribe some special importance to them. Which we do on the internet. We ascribe a lot of importance to these numbers. Way too much in fact, as if a man's value as a human being depends on him being able to lift this much.*
And that's why I'm emphasising the kool-aide here. I'm not offended at all the Rippetoe has a gym and some books, or that a lot of guys are encouraging each other to lift 2, 3 and 4 plates. I'm fine with that. It's the ideology that comes with it all, that people really do get caught up in, and that I certainly got caught up in (thus why I'm listing it as a mistake I made when I first got into powerlifting).
*Yes, I know it's powerlifting. Being able to lift as much as possible is important to the sport. But making an ideology out of how much you lift is some seriously messed up culty shiz, and using weight on the bar rather than the lifter's actual progress, needs and proficiency to determine whether or not they're a beginner is just silly.