Waaay back in my development days i ran into a couple of similar situations. One brainy guy leading the department wanted to put all of our systems analysis specs being developed into a spreadsheet. I had to explain to him that it would be a nightmare to keep the spreadsheet revisions orderly. Another place i interviewed for a job where the whole shop was using Perl to develop a major application. I had to zip my lip about what a nightmare a complex Perl system would be to maintain, and just politely walked out.