Also he thought I had done something using ElasticSearch because I was an ElasticSearch guy, instead of having learned ElasticSearch because I thought it was what was needed (and no amount of explaining this simple concept could penetrate)
Agree. But it should be noted that the needs of a startup may not always make that easy. I'm personally responsible for transmogrifying an existing Perl ORM for a company, because it only supported a single database handle / class. Which is a pain when you're in a master / slave environment. This hack allowed the company to meet the performance challenges that came along each year by summer. It also allowed growing the company from ~35 people in 2004 to about 5000 people in 2012 (when I left).
It also froze the version of the ORM in question, until it got rewritten from scratch at great expense. But that expense could now be easily carried by the company.
I suppose it depends how you define "quality" - in my recent experience, it's always been the "rockstars" that are the worst developers. Because they generally write code which ends up being a nightmare to support and maintain when they're gone. Sure, it's great you wrote your own ORM in Perl but 10 years later it'll be crippling the company because no-one can make any changes without it breaking 27 other things.
(Ok, it's often Perl people...)
For me, a quality developer is someone who achieves the goals of the company in understandable, maintainable, testable, and documented code.