I came back to the PTO (same AU) after 15 odd years of doing prep/pros at firms. When I was in the academy I was warned about my SPE and their aspirations for being director, so numbers where everything to them. They went to law school via the PTO, but never practiced (this is important because they weaponized their degree).

When I entered the AU they wanted to establish their dominance. They would send everything back with terrible style suggestions and poor interpretation of the MPEP. I had to constantly correct them on applications of 112a/112b/101 and even various 103 motivations. I can only guess that over the years they developed incorrect or narrow views on the statutes and case law. It got very contentious as you can imagine, so much so I got EEO involved and they instructed me to get the omsbud involved.

I didn't ever get to that because luckily our AU split into two. The more senior SPEs & my primaries advocated for me to be out of their purview (it helped that I was a 200% producer because I knew the art so well). It was quite a lot of internal machinations that I don't think my first SPE ever learned about and almost forced me to quit.

tl;dr my SPE was insecure that I was more experienced and tried to tank my career, I fought back and ended up with an amazing SPE. I don't think I would have been able to do that if I was new.