I know! But what can you do?
Clearly, if he was any sort of manager he would listen to any proposals, I'm astounded how some people get into these positions. At the end of the day IT is there to not only make things easier for the end user, but also for those that have to support end users. If it takes a bit of effort in the first instance that could save you hours of repeated work in the long term, then surely it's a no brainier, especially if it's going to cost nothing.
I don't know your infrastructure, or if you can support it, but it's doubtful it wouldn't work as long as workstations are able to network boot, you have a server (or VM) you can use as a management server, and you can run Win2K8 R2/2012.
How big is the user base you support? I mean it may not qualify for such an enterprise approach, but I use it at home! lol
The good thing about it is that it's an end to end build process. You can inject drivers into the PE environment, or into the build process itself, you can deploy applications during the process (AV clients or core applications), you can run custom scripts and you can include WSUS as part of the process (if you wanted to). You end up with a completely built machine on a domain, with no adaptation needed in under and hour (depending on image size). It's Lite>Zero touch capable.