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SC Official, your experience is different from mine. YMMV, so I will amend my remarks to address only the world I know, here in SE PA.
Around here, the only officials who talk about advantage/disadvantage and discretion are old-timers like me. At chapter meetings, we are much more likely to get, "This is what is required."
"Consistency" becomes chimerical and complete uniformity is impossible to mandate. Even taking into account the tendencies (or limitations) of individual officials, the game is simply too fast, too fluid. POEs are fine, but when the same points must be reiterated every season, maybe that's because they simply can not be met to anyone's satisfaction.
Would the flow and quality of the game (to borrow a phrase from another thread) really be improved by calling every two-hand touch, for example? Are we to apply advantage/disadvantage on drives to the basket but not to a player dribbling laterally at mid-court without advancing? In this world of mandates and POEs, if you accept some notion of discretion, you are already contradicting mandates.
Officials with good game management skills will often ignore meaningless automatics, in the interest of letting the game flow. Perhaps consequently, a bureaucrat will then decide, "We need to re-issue this POE because people aren't calling it."
What I see here is a conflict between pseudo-objective "consistency" and good game management. Good officials, with good judgment, don't need mandates and automatics; mediocre officials, with poor judgment, won't be improved by them.
I'm a crotchety, cynical old man: I much prefer "teach, then trust."
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