Missed the entire last two pages somehow!
This is getting slightly off topic, so I'll answer Delvis' question first: No, keep the SAR and aim for a pause on that too.
Monkee, I actually completely agree with you that Delvis needs to push himself, but he is just about to start his second 4 week cycle of 531 where he'll almost certainly be hitting PBs. I think he was correct to be slightly cautious, maybe not 10kg off his max though...
Stoodles, since you quite rightly like to point out where other people's attitude towards lifting isn't ideal, I'm going to return the favour!
Finding justifications to continue using form you know to be bad is a terrible way to approach training. I'm not talking about the final couple of % of nuance that I might sometimes talking about or point out, you know that you have big breaks in form.
However, some of your justifications are very reasonable, at least on the surface.
Yes, there are risks in the gym whether your form is good or not. The injuries I've had have not been related to poor form, apart from my shoulder issues which are the legacy of training like a **** in the beginning. ALL of my injuries have been preventable though. This holds true for most people, but for most people their injuries ARE due to poor form. I'm sure you remember how painful me working on your pec was, well that's an indication of extremely poor tissue quality. If muscle that jaffed up is loaded poorly or overstretched it will just pop and go one day. Muscles get messed up like this from chronic over use in poor positions. Sometimes this can't be helped (leg length discrepancies, for example), but largely it can be.
Another perhaps more relevant factor with messed up muscle tissue is that it can't work as hard. This has implications for strength, but also massively affects hypertrophy.
Good form and good tissue equality allows your muscles to exert their full contraction potential over a set. This factor is additive with being able to use greater load on exercises due to working joint systems in an optimal fashion. More load = more stress = more adaptation, as you know.
Matt is actually both a good and poor example of this. I guarantee that the actual mass in his pecs reflects the numbers he's benching. This isn't obvious because of his shoulder and thoracic spine positioning. But these positions have allowed him be be exceptionally strong and train like a beast for years, which is a very rare thing indeed. On the other side of that coin, I suspect that his legs look small compared to his squat because a) his huge back can compensate to some extent, and b) for the same reason my legs don't look big; our quads have only grown as big as they need to. The mass on my legs is in my glutes, hamstrings and adductors, but that is a product of the technique that I use.
I'm not trying to frame an argument that you MUST change your mind here. If you're happy with what you're doing then great. I do think that you're lucky to some extent, in that you can make progress without good technique because of how you are able to train for your goals. However, this style of training also makes it very easy to correct things. I guarantee that you'll be able to get a reasonable amount of fatigue doing corrective work, apart from on deadlift. In fact you'd probably find that you laid some delicious new lean gains down in certain areas rapidly because of the change in stimulus (I find this happens in my mid back). You could spend some time sacrificing ~15% stress on certain exercises while still destroying yourself with other stuff.
ALSO, don't think that this means you're allowed to get away with avoiding a Powerlifting Pasting at Iffley
Not even many hotties in there which is annoying.