Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?
The fix is to ditch Ubuntu's "third party" support and just install it directly from the nVidia website instead. This is a bit of a hassle (you have to shut down X on the first install), but it fixes the breakage on every kernel update and gets you a far more modern driver.
I find Ubuntu's insistence on maintaining bug comparability on LTS releases to be pretty baffling. mplayer's GUI doesn't work out of the box, and the fix is easy, but they refuse to do it because it's an LTS release. nVidia drivers are broken but again, you can't fix it because it's LTS. Zsh manpages don't get installed, but that can't be fixed because it's LTS. Whatever happened to being the distro where everything just works out of the box?
There are two products here, for two kinds of people:
LTS is a product for people who want security updates but absolutely no other changes.
The next release is a product for people who want bug fixes and new features, in addition to security updates.
Your comment is essentially asking "but why didn't they make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor?". They didn't make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor because it's the spicy flavor, not the mild flavor.
Ubuntu doesn't really have a good middle ground distribution. Something like the old -STABLE release track on BSD where you get fixes and reasonable support but no ABI changes or major OS changes.