yeah... From what I remember, I always thought his early stuff was ok (maybe still a little low volume, but definitely good for 2-3 month periods) but the later stuff really went off the deep end, maybe more for marketing purposes?
Possibly, but he saw people making progress, and his clients would always burn out on the more frequent stuff. He would reduce frequency, thus allowing a deload, and then he would assume you had to do that as you got stronger. His reasoning was great and concrete, unfortunately it did not pan out.
If you think about it, Mike died in 2001. His clients that were eating high calories and not really training would have put on lots of fat as well in a lot of cases, and thus reported back 'I gained 20 pounds'. Since they only really had dial up, pictures back and forth was harder to do. Remember you had to go get the film developed and then go to a friends house/your office and get a scanner? It wasn't like it is today outside of taking pictures with your web cam, which I don't think was around just yet for everyone in 2001.
But Mike should have demanded pictures, especially if he was going to talk about gaining 40 pounds in a few months.