The "messed up motor pathways" is a shorthand way of saying that you did some shit wrong and to failure for a length of time and you brain, not knowing any better said 'oh, this is how I'm supposed to do this. This muscle first and then this..etc. and so on. This is called motor learning and it is specific to the movement you are doing.
It is not as an important factor in low skill weight training as it would be say, in the olympic lifts, but sufficeth to say that there is a certain amount of plasticity in the motor system that allows the brain to learn and prioritize certain patterns of movement. It would be an overstatement indeed to say "I can't deadlift" but it would be fair to say "I can't deadlift correctly right now". Learning is NOT just intention. You can have now clue how to do something properly, be unaware that you are doing it wrong, and "learn" to do it this incorrect way, thus establishing movement patterns that will require you to back off to lighter weights and "re-learn". As I said it becomes more of an issue the more complex the movement but it is an issue.
Look at it this way. Once you learn to ride a bike you never forget, right? Why is this? You guessed it. HOWEVER, you may be able to ride a bike but unable to ride a bike really really fast even though another guy who's essentially the same as you and has been riding bikes the same amount of time with the same effort is much faster. Why is this? Well, because he learned better, all other things being equal.
If you try to re-learn bike riding in this certain way that allows the most effecient transfer of power to the pedals, it will be harder to do that than it was to learn to basically ride the bike in the first place depending on how long you've been riding of course.
When you don't have a lot of experience doing something like deads, which is one of the more compex of the slow lifts, especially if you want to do it well, and you spend a lot of time as an inexperienced deadlifter doing it to failure and beyond....that is a way to "learn it wrong". NO, it doesn't physically damage you and cause you not to be able to walk. That's just some silly defensive shit from people who are being defensive.
What it does is force you to spend this honeymoon time with deads too much in a state of fatigue and at intensities that are not really conducive to learing proper movement patterns. Think about it. How much of the feedback that you brain is getting is at a time when you have already recieved the "stop" message. This is not a way to develop proper movement patterns.
Even from a simple "this muscle too tired that bigger muscle not tired" you can see what will happen. The brain is like one of those choreagraphers. All it knows is that the show has to go on at all costs. So if one of the dancers is not up to snuff and can't get the job done what does the choreographer do? He puts all the work on his best/strongest dancers. What happens when just a few of the best dancers are doing all the work? The show sucks.
DC training forced you into a situation where not necessarily the correct movement patterns were learned, but the ones that were necessary to get the job done under a situation of too much stress. Problem is that it only gets the job done for so long before imbalances put you on the sidelines. Basically strong/overactive muscles and weak/inhibited one and all sort of complicated shit getting messed up as you go along doing things the same way.
One thing I forgot to say is that for less skill oriented movements all this stuff is very load dependent. I.E. there is a certain weight at which you can't perform a proper rep but this is not a maximal weight. There is a likewise a lighter weight that you can perform a proper rep through paying attention to good form.
This is what I meant when I said before that the weight you achieved during the DC "doesn't count" IF you want to relearn the deads, do them right, and live up to your potential.
Really what it comes down to is bad form being relearned and just like always heavy weights and learning do not mix.
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