I know people will now argue into oblivion about powershell vs bash, but I actually wonder why was this person hired in first place to manage windows based systems what clearly seems not be his domain of expertise?
You can argue until you're blue in the face about if my approach was the right one, ultimately though what we did worked, was incredibly lean, easy to understand/troubleshoot/debug and most importantly it served the goals of the business.
Could we have gotten up to speed with the Windows way of doing things?
Probably.
There were so many niggling problems with the platform that were not part of my prejudice, that if we continued to go that route I am certain that 1000's of our person-hours would have been consumed even if we had been absolute experts, things like the fact that windows bonding in 2012R2 was done in userland, that joining to the domain requires a reboot (which will break your software if it's registering to take workloads on boot), that powershell versions are often incompatible and that interface devices are very difficult to deterministically reference.
Windows sysadmins seem to come in two varieties:
1) Experts who know exactly what Windows is thinking at all times
2) Button mashers
Unix/Linux engineers have a much broader range of knowledge, and there's certainly more of them on the senior end.
For large farms of Windows servers this is done in the base image, it finishes the first boot already domain-joined.
Windows Server has a built-in service for remotely imaging servers over the network that integrates with this.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.