I can't tell if I'm incompetent or everyone else is

Fairly often when SMEs give me text to put in a rulemaking document, I have half a dozen comments or questions per page about relatively basic issues: "I've changed this from passive voice to active voice." "This is unclear, do you mean that people are not allowed to use that equipment, or that they are not required to use it?" "These two paragraphs are almost completely redundant, so why not just combine them?" And, of course, "Stop using 'shall' when you mean 'must', you illiterate jackass! You're supposed to be writing a regulation for modern laymen in the general public, not a period piece set in Georgian England!"

Ahem. I don't actually say that last, of course. But I think it. And I do raise the issues or make the changes on my own. When the SMEs reply, the answer is usually (paraphrased) "Don't blame me, I just copied that from an international standard/a previously existing regulation/another current rulemaking."

Then I sit and feel nihilistic about inconsistency for about a minute before making my changes anyway.

Why? Well, wometimes the SMEs are wrong about where it's from to begin with - they copied and pasted more than they intended or less or from chapter 89 instead of 98. It's easy to pin the blame for mistakes like that. It's a harder to handle problems like using a vague advisory guideline as an iron-clad requirement or just plain bad writing, though.

For example, yesterday I got curious and actually read a document that the doomed project uses as a resource, and even considering how standards change over time, I was struck by how much I wanted to edit the document. Big chunks of it are outdated, because it was written 20 years ago about a technological issue, and vague even considering the age. The document in general is a non-binding guideline, and we want to make its guidance mandatory, and sometimes that's harder than just changing "should" or "shall" to "must". And it's mostly in the passive voice. I guess that might make sense for the writers of an advisory document, who don't care who is doing certain things as long as they're getting done, but our agency shouldn't be as unconcerned about it. Same for times SMEs have used our own previous regulations as a template - sometimes it should be smoother, and sometimes if I'm reading it correctly it just plain doesn't work as written.

It seems to me like most of the documents we use as resources either would be OK in some contexts but definitely not for us here and now, or make me wonder how the authors ever got away with it in the first place. Did style guides and plain language standards really change THAT much over the past few decades, or am I being too picky, or what?