there is a strong tendency for people to congregate there whose views seem to be untempered by any knowledge of deletion policy. For them "if in doubt, don't delete" sounds like inclusionist claptrap rather than an accurate quote from the deletion policy. For them, the lists of "Problems that don't require deletion" and "Problems that may require deletion" might as well not exist. They'll ask for deletion because an article is a mess, or because the content has POV problems, or because it's deteriorated but was once good, or because the subject does not merit an article (for which the remedy is of course a merge) . There is a serious problem here, and saying "well we don't really need that content, we can always rewrite it/temp undelete it/whatever" isn't really an adequate defense for what is often a quite shocking miscarriage of deletion policy.
I agree with Tony - over and over I see things on AfD which do not meet the deletion criteria. More disturbing is the tendency to nominate an article for deletion with the admission "I don't know anything about this topic". IMO, if you don't know anything about a topic, then the impetus is on you to find out, not to AfD it and hope that someone knowledgeable will come along and educate you. Of course, THEN people come along and say "yeah, delete it" (without doing any research).
I think that any article nominated for deletion should include reference to the applicable deletion criteria, otherwise the noms should be deleted as spurious.
Ian