Ask HN: How to argue coworker saying strong database encryption is unimportant?

I am no security specialist, and my knowledge of it is generally weak, but I looked into the subject enough to know best practices and what makes them the most secure, such as bcrypt, scrypt, and PBKDF2.

When I discovered my company was encrypting passwords with SHA2, I tried explaining how this was wrong and got talked down by a coworker arguing that this was unimportant compared to the importance of making sure nobody gets to the database in the first place. She was basically saying that that's much more important and if that's done right then having strong encryption isn't that vital.

Unfortunately I didn't know enough to counterargue and had to say 'okay,' which bothers me to this day (several months later).

Can anyone explain why she was wrong, or conversely why she was right?

I was just sort of noting this to a roomful of relevant engineers in the hopes of gathering some support for strengthening encryption and got talked down by one of them and nobody else cared enough to say anything.