Man, I gotta say, maybe the guy had a point. A brush is the main tool of the trade, right? It's like saying a chef is just a person with a knife. That brush is what gets the job done, clean and simple. Sometimes people say stuff without thinking how it sounds. He might have just been having a bad day and it came out wrong.
Yeah, and it's wild how often we judge the tool instead of the skill, right? Like @troy_harris said, a chef with a knife is still a chef. I see it all the time with people calling a graphic designer just "someone with Photoshop." The tool is nothing without the person who knows how to use it.