I would approach this differently. The question to ask is, "How can I convince the manager who has authority to make change X, that switching to Y will benefit him/her personally? How can I show them that the change will decrease the hassles in their life and/or lead to higher compensation for them?"

Ya I guess..

Was looking for something more along the lines of "PM at [cool unicorn] says none of the cool kids do X anymore" but maybe that could work.

Other than finding out about that practice in the interview stage and using it as a yellow flag suggesting that it might not be the job you want? Not really.

Either management understands software development or they don't, and it's not something you can really teach them either. I don't need my managers to know our stack or even be capable of developing working software themselves, but it's hard for someone who's never spent 6 months working in the coding trenches to understand the amount of uncertainty inherent in software development.

Ya, so it goes I guess. Was actually looking forward to something more organized after having no process to speak of for a year. And it's not even like the estimates get held over my head much or anything, just that putting in sub-tasks for..

1. add input box 2. create functionality to store input box value 3. have next page display value

..and keeping track of the time spent on each step is reeally annoying.