Why would I want to do things "the same as everyone else," when everyone else is writing illegible and badly structured code?

The idea that consistency is its own virtue is a folly that pervades the industry. Consistency is only virtuous when it is based on good standards, and whether it's formatting (which was bad when I started in 1988 and has gotten steadily worse since) or the insistence on shoehorning every scrap of work into a design pattern.

I don't think "inexperienced" is quite the word you're looking for here; I was doing more solid work a year into the industry than a lot of people do after a quarter century. Because I (slaps forehead) thought about what I was doing.

Most developers I work with care more about "team standards" than anything else. Like one project I did for the Windows 7 taskbar where the other developer on the project fumed and seethed all day that I wasn't following the team standard, which I had thrown in the trash because it didn't have a single good idea.

"Why are you creating an object instance from a class factory every time someone does a keystroke," I asked him once.

"That’s how we work in this *team*” he replied frostily.

Great answer, champ.

Good developers think about what they're doing, and conformity is secondary to cleanly structured code.