I can see this causing all kinds of problems. You're not going to allocate an option pool for employee layers one through five all at once, prior to your seed round, because that'd be massively dilutive to you in the event of an early sale. (The unused options go away, but the premoney the VC invested at takes the unused options into account.) But creating such hefty option pools down the road is going to cause issues with your existing investors, who at that point would be diluted.
The conflicting interests of founders and earlier investors (who don't want to be diluted by a large new option pool) and later, new investors (who want to make sure the company has a lot of options to incent new employees) will get you to an 'industry-standard pool' pretty naturally. Unless the market's changed dramatically recently, that standard pool is a hell of a lot smaller than what Joel's suggesting.