The one thing I still have a hard time with is that municipal inspectors hold no liability on their inspections. If the house burns down, oh well. If we inspect a new home and miss a staple running thru a wire, uh oh.

The reality is as I mentioned before, we are not engineers. A simple example is calling a header size on the first floor. You can look all you want but you do not know the engineering loads on this home. What are the loads from the second floor and roof?

If you are worried about protecting yourself you would be the wiser to use verbage like Scott mentioned "it does not meat recognized building practices"
If you see a manufactured floor joist all cut up, write it as such and add "it does not meat recognized building practices" Even the plumber that cut that joist up new it was wrong when he did it. He had no choice but to cut it up or wait for the bulder to have that area reframed to allow for the plumbing. All the municipal inspector does is write failed on the inspection sheet and might give a slight reason. He does not quote paragraphs of code. If its wrong, Its wrong.

As Scott mentioned again, If it is wrong it is wrong.

Ted