Yes, of course there are legitimate uses of "in general". But for the normative text of a JTC 1 standard, "requirements shall be expressed in terms of performance rather than design or descriptive characteristics" - what we really want is testable, prescriptive statements. So it's quite hard to think of legitimate uses of "in general" in normative text, where testing if something really was a general case would be tricky, or irrelevant to the performance of the Standard. In notes, examples and other informative text however, it could be very useful.
That ODF, in general, is written in terms of "descriptive characteristics" is a grave systematic fault and a major reason why (I suspect) there will need to be some wholesale re-drafting ...
- Alex.