Nope. Old guys are just stuck in their ways. Square cuts fine if you know what you're doing.

Have you checked the charging circuit on that APC before swapping the battery? I had nearly the same thing happen with a unit at a small law office last year. The battery swelled and the charging board went bad, which sent dirty voltage into everything downstream. Cost me a whole weekend to replace two switches and a NAS that the UPS was supposed to protect. My rule now is to test the output with a multimeter under load every six months, not just trust the "replace battery" light. Those lights only catch the battery, not the board that charges it, so the real killer hides until it is too late.

People get real attached to how they do things, and that usually says more about them than the photo. Some folks stack because it's the only way they know, and some edit raw because they can't sit through an hour of stacking software. It's the same pattern you see with any hobby, like woodworkers arguing over hand tools versus power tools. Both get you a finished piece, but the process changes how you think about the craft. The real issue is people treat their method like a personality trait instead of just a tool. If the final image looks good and you didn't fake the data, the workflow doesn't matter much.