Nah sounds like a seasoned architect. The first thing I had to unlearn was that I had any say over my architecture.
Maybe the problem with software architects is that they only exist in bureaucratically hellish companies, and exist as a scapegoat for bad management decisions?
Your experience matches mine. I can think of twice where I stood my ground and argued with a more senior person. Both times I was shown to be right technically but that came at a big cost to my career. I would have been much better off letting the project crash and burn.
I think there are senior people that are different. Hell, there might be companies full of them. But I'd need to see first hand proof of it before doing anything harder than gentle pushback.
If you're arguing with your boss's boss's boss, who has worked at the company for five years and the industry for two decades, and you think you've unraveled their entire argument by reading a few blog posts, you're wrong approaching 100% of the time. Best case scenario is that you've missed something specific to your company, or industry, or the current technical implementation, or some obscure contract the previous CTO signed that they're still trying to get out of.
In pc86's scenario, though, it's much more likely that you're the one with the ego, thinking that reading a few blog posts makes you more informed than a 20-year industry vet.
In my experience it's rarely (read: never) that clear, is my point. When it's that "obviously" wrong, there's almost certainly something you don't understand.
Looks like we found the CTO :)