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UnclGhost comments on Don’t Apply the Principle of Charity to Yourself - Less Wrong
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Principle of charity trades off epistemic rationality for efficiency and signaling of respect. An improved version of the technique is LCPW (or "steel man"), where you focus your attention on the best version of the argument made by your opponent that you yourself can reconstruct. You don't require the improved argument to satisfy the exact wording used by the interlocutor, and more importantly don't need to assume that it's what they really mean, or pretend that you believe it's what they mean. The evidence about which position the other person really holds often points in a different direction from where the best version of their position can be found, so it's useful to keep separate mental buckets for these ideas.
So the improved version of your thesis is, "Don't apply the principle of charity at all, use LCPW technique instead". (As a bonus, steel manning your own beliefs means fixing your own epistemic errors.)
Huh, I'd never realized the connection between PoC and LCPW before. I'll have to think about that, although I wouldn't necessarily say LCPW is a replacement for PoC. They solve different problems in practice--like lessdazed said, PoC can be more effective at countering overconfidence in knowing what you think your opponent meant, if that's the goal. Would you mind giving an example though?
ETA:
I agree that if you're going to use PoC, you shouldn't apply it internally and unilaterally--if responding as though your opponent made a good argument requires some unlikely assumptions, you should still be well aware of that.