Most old school pool builders think this way because they also believe that you need to have an absolute number of turnovers per day to keep the pool clean (like 4 or 5 turnovers per day). It has be proven that the concept of "turnovers" as it relates to pool cleanliness is not significant - if all you're looking at is water clarity and cleanliness, most pools only need two hours of pump runtime to make the water sufficiently clean such that the average pool owner can't tell the difference between a pool that's been run for two hours and one that has been run for more than two hours. If your adding on a saltwater chlorine generator, then extra pump runtime is typically needed to generate enough chlorination for sanitary water. Even then, most SWGs will operate as low as 15 GPM and their chlorine production rate is independent of flow rate so you can still run a pool pump quite slow.
VSPs are not hokum which is just a colloquial way of saying "nonsense". Your PBs lack of understanding and closed-mindedness is what is truly "hokum"...