What you're describing the director do sounds like the favorite pastime of HR directors. They just love going out and changing up the performance review software every couple years without consulting anyone else and paying enormous amounts of money for it. At least the current favorite for this (Lattice) has decent UX versus some of the past ones I saw used all over (PeopleSoft in particular)
PeopleSoft, especially before the mid-2010s and depending on how it was configured, was an exercise in terrible UX. You'd have to click through like 6 pages just to change one thing. At one point, I remember there being an encoding difference between Firefox and IE that meant that you could have longer self evaluations in IE. The way they'd configure SMART goals and such was insane and it would regularly error out and dump your written text, so people would write their stuff in notepad and paste it in to submit.
Lattice is not perfect but it legitimately seems to be designed by people who understand that it's not actually useful to anyone and that the best user experience is just to make it as easy as possible to phone it in, complete with built in LLM stuff to take your poorly written self eval and make it look better.
