Also, there's an unstated reality here that the person who sets the standards is a senior person (in the company, in his career, in the industry) and may just be letting personal judgment and past success - good in its time, but not necessarily timeless - override his judgment about a legitimately new and better way of doing something. This is tech after all: progress is valuable, and objectivity is hard.
Sometimes you have to learn different paradigms and ways to express computer program.