You have a weird boss who has time for nitpicking code. 😃 As a staff software engineer on some aspects I agree with him, on others not so much. I think what he misses entirely is that there are cases when the right approach is very context-dependent. I would also argue, just like Martin Fowler, that code can always be refactored to be faster, better-looking, etc, but software is written to be released and solve problems for users, not to sit on the developer's machine for months, making it look better and fancier.