I used the A/E/C standards to come up with some standards for our company. There are a number of things I don't like about the standard. Of course, as near as I could tell, it hadn't really changed since 2001 or so. It's geared toward color-dependant plot styles, although it is setup in such a way that if you ignore the speciified colors, you can modify the standard to use STBs instead.
The biggest problem with the standard is that it is too general. The way it is defined, it causes way too many things to go on the same level. In surveying, we end up with 80% of our linework on one of four layers. I consider this unacceptable in a standard. Related to this problem, the standard encourages changing individual objects' linetypes. It defines a broad category, requires all objects in that category to be placed on the same layer, and then specifies three linetypes that can be used for objects on that layer. So, many objects end up with custom linetypes, not ByLayer. Not only does this result in, for example, too many yellow objects on the screen, it makes working with drawings really annoying.
However, there were a lot of good ideas in the standard. So, to come up with the first draft of my company standards, I took the A/E/C standards and used them as a starting point. I then changed/ignored aspects of the A/E/C standard that are brain-dead.
There's also a piece of software called TSWS that is supposed to make it easier to deal with layer names, linetypes, symbols, etc. It sucks. As near as I can tell, it's geared to work with architectural scales (1 drawing unit = 1 inch). I found some note that indicated it was possible to use it with decimal scales (1 drawing unit = 1 foot), but couldn't find any information on how to go about it, and couldn't get it to work. Luckily, the software is not very useful. It might help a bit at first, but Autocad tools such as drawing templates, the Layer Translator, the Symbol Manager, and point description keys are much easier to use.