I honestly can't figure out what he's attempting to do here. It sounds like he doesn't want to force a work email account on his employees. I don't think many people would have a problem with a work email, it's the norm after all, but fine. But he also doesn't want to add their personal email addresses to his address book (is this why he wants the @dnalounge.com addresses?) I'm not sure what this setup is attempting…
He does create a work email account for his employees. He doesn't want to force them to use a separate email client so he allows his employees to set up forwarding from his server to their personal gmail account. They can use his smtp server from gmail for sending stuff out so they get to use both their personal and work email from the same interface.
So again, I'm not sure what problem he's trying to solve here. To be clear I'm not saying he shouldn't be able to set up his email this way and have it work, just that I don't get why he WANTS to do it this way. What is it accomplishing?