Question:
" From the outside looking in, it looks a bit too much like training athlete like powerlifters (coming from a powerlifter) How many athletes trulyneed to be bench pressing in their programs when dumbbells work fine? How many athletes need to be doing slow, grind it out max effort deadlifts when clean/snatch pulls and/or Trap Bar deadlifts work fine? Why not just take the pieces that translate to being strong/athletic and leave behind so much of the powerlifting specificity?"
Conjugate is a STRENGTH program, not a powerlifting program. Remember, many of its theories and percentages are stolen from old Olympic weight lifting and track and field training. Conjugate was originally used in Soviet Russia where 40 plus Olympic sports trained under its guidelines.
It was popularized by Westside which happens to be a powerlifting gym. Powerlifting is Squat, Bench and Deadlift. In the conjugate model with athletes, we did these actual exercises MAYBE a couple of times each YEAR. If you look at it this way, most of the other college programs are WAAAAAY more powerlifting based than Conjugate. Also, if you run a Conjugate program correctly you will see your amount of true explosive work being done is more than many popular programs in the college setting but somehow people associate Conjugate with nothing but maxing out. I mentioned before I did not care what the athletes squat max was, same for bench press. The bench is just a great way to develop upper body strength and power. That's why we used it. If dumbells work just as well, use them.
Question:
"How many athletes need to be doing slow, grind it out max effort deadlifts when clean/snatch pulls and/or Trap Bar deadlifts work fine? Why not just take the pieces that translate to being strong/athletic and leave behind so much of the powerlifting specificity?"
Take the simplest movements and manipulate the load and bar speed and you can make them power developers. Using these simple movement allows you to get proper neuromuscular firing that everyone harps about lately. Clean and snatch variations often turn into a shit show. The athlete's arent' strong enough to execute them properly. How many athletes need to clean/ snatch pull when they can do speed pulls and jumps to obtain the same results. Speed pulls and jumps are also a lot easier to teach than any olympic variants. "Grinding' is a great way to reach untapped central nervous system potential. The movement done is irrelevant, that's why we change it each week. This is not to say you couldn't add the variations you talked about, I just don't think you have to. We kept it simple and have had great results. I think that's the error people make with the system, they try to make too many adjustments to it. I think people are going to be surprised at how simple our program was.