I worked under C coding standards for a while where the trinary* operator was prohibited as "too advanced"; maintenance programmers wouldn't understand it.

Your post made me laugh out loud. I had a similar situation -- I was in a group that had a new leader parachuted in, and he hated it when I used the ternary operator -- too fancy, he said. I was half a dozen years out of Waterloo by then .. I think he was trying to make up for the fact that he had a diploma in Tourism. Or something.