I was not accusing anyone of anything. I was merely assessing a commonly used statement. I simply find these kind of trite statements and formulas to be useless from an argumentation standpoint.
I know, I got your point. Believe me, it is well-taken from a scholarship standpoint. I was just pointing out that saying such things does not necessarily amount to straw-manning, which the last sentence of your paragraph in this post seemed to imply. I know you did not explicitly accuse anyone, but when you replied to the statement in question by saying we should not argue against our opponents according to "what we think they should confess," to me it implies that this is in fact exactly what was being done. At the moment, I can't make sense of the comment any other way in the context presented. Forgive me if I am misreading you or your intent.