The "security" feature has a documented workaround, and is there because the components reading older versions have vulnerabilities. It si quite simple to define a folder as "safe" and move the documents there, or to define the folder where the documents are located as "safe". This feature has been ther esince Office 2003, and your IT support people should know this.
If your boss could not open ODF in MS Office, then maybe it is because Office open ODF files according to the standard. The problem is that most of the vendors using ODF have added extensions which are not (yet) part of the standard. Is that Microsofts fault?
When you are writing negatively about OOXML, at least get your facts correct. There is no "Do it like Excel 2007" in there. There are a few "do it like Office 95 Word", but those are only needed to correctly render a few minor formatting features on documents originally created in Word 95. How critical is it to ensure that every minor formatting detail from a document created more than ten years ago is correct?
As for your last paragraph: Even without the spec, you can get the content of any OOXML document. Any OOXML document is a zipped folder structure with the text stored as plain text with XML tags. No risk of losing access to the content. Quite an improvement compared to the old DOC/XLS formats, and for those who remember, the WordPerfect formats (yes, I have tried to decode it).