Sounds like you had the right combination of corprate culture and the ability to argue your point well. There usually isn't much you can do about a company's culture, but I think argueing correctly is something more programmers (including myself) should learn.

When the boss sends out an e-mail saying that by next week, your entire web site must be converted to using MS Access as a backend, it's easy to run down to his office and tell him that he is a bloody fool. That is also what you absolutely must not do. It'll likely get you fired, no matter what your company's culture is like.

However, if you take the time to come up with a solid case, covering (for instance) how Access doesn't allow concurrent database connections and what that means when you have anything much more than 100 hits/day, you've done your job. Depending on the culture, they might still fire you--if they're that dumb, they probably did you a favor. They could ignore you, in which case you've done everything you could, so it won't be your head when the web site falls to peices (especially if you left a paper trail of your suggestions).