If you haven't been at the company long, or it hasn't been in existance long, you may have a chance to win them over to your side -- slowly -- assuming that they are a little wet behind the ears with managing programming projects and are teachable. "Incramentalism" works great in politics, why not in programming? Over time slowly insert new idioms into the code, add 'use strict' to old code, clean things up...

It sounds like the company is established though, due to the exsitance of "magical" legacy code that must not be touched. If you've been there a while and have built up some respect, have a go at it -- you may convince them. I was in a job once where I didn't, no matter how hard I tried, and it was a long painful lesson.

FWIW, there is nothing wrong with writing code that a beginner who has never coded before can understand -- as long as the code is about 20 lines long. Complex problems generally require complex solutions (unless they're already on CPAN), and inexperienced beginners won't understand them even if you've written them in the academics' choice of Pascal or some form of pseudocode.

Penny-pinching (pound-foolish) companies will meet their doom before too long, hopefully your's isn't. The company I was at died a meager death.