You have three issues here:
1. There are few homebrewers that are actually good enough (I'm certainly not) to make "better" beer with AG than extract. If you are currently making better beer with AG than extract, it's probably because going AG has caused you to put more time, effort, and money into your brewing, and you are taking great care to learn as much as possible, and your process has gotten better as a result. I think that's one of the only downsides to starting with extract brewing, bad habits are easier to come by because the process is more forgiving. I guarantee you if Jamil Z made you one of his recipes with extract, you wouldn't know the difference. Process wins every time.
2. You have to figure out what you want out of the hobby... I do AG because, to me, it's a LOT more fun!
If what you want out of brewing is to bang out good beer in the shortest amount of time, extract is the way to go. If you want to geek out and experience brewing as a historical, organic, and somewhat messy phenomenon, then you absolutely have to go AG... there's nothing that connects you to all previous fellow brewers like experiencing an AG brew. Something about dumping extract into a pot and stirring it just doesn't give you the same "connection" to the brewing universe, in my mind.
3. Many extract brewers rag on AG brewers because they "waste time" with AG, and many AG brewers rag on extract brewers for "wasting money". Well, unless everyone's time is only worth $5 an hour, we're ALL "wasting" a bit of both every time we brew anyway, aren't we? Find the reason you WANT to brew extract, don't look for reasons to NOT brew AG... if all your reasons for brewing extract are reasons you can't/won't brew AG, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Likewise, if the only reason you're brewing AG is to "save money", you need to sell that B.S. somewhere else... you'll be brewing until Jesus comes back to recoup the money you've spent over and above the extract brewer in equipment and time.
Unless you're like your friend here that gets to brew every week, but how many of us get to do that?
I think it just comes down to people not looking at this as some sort of debate that they need to pick a side in. They are both perfectly valid and both equally capable of making world-class beer and brain cell-killing swill. WHY you're doing the one you've chosen will always be more important than the fact THAT you're doing it. At least, that's my $0.02...