SOP, rules, and regulations have made commercial aviation the success it currently is. To argue otherwise, to argue SOP are only for the NOOBs is BS. 81 percent of incidents between 1979 and 1994 had the Captain as PF. A statistic which should make thinking men think.
We have over 13,000 pilots at my carrier. There are over 2000 pilots on my fleet alone. Without SOP we would have 2000 independent operators.
I shake my head when I read stuff I have seen on this thread. Don't like your SOP, get it changed. Intentional SOP non compliance? There is a litany accidents attributed to that. A pilot killing him or herself because he or she is so stupid to think they know better than everyone else and intentionally violate SOP is unfortunate.
What pisses me off to high heaven is when they kill their passengers in the process of being so incredibly stupid.