Probably there was a long history of people proposing fixes to this particular problem. While a specific technical issue was obvious to him, the problem was not understood at that level by those in charge. Those in charge also had far more to lose than he did by accepting the input of yet another expert on faith.

Chalking this up to pointless bureaucracy is in a sense the inverse of the “build it like that but six inches to the left” class of requests from non-technical stakeholders.