Why do I hate this code?

During a recent code review, I gave feedback asking for code like the following to be refactored:

function getPreferenceLevelText(companyName, companyPreferenceLevel, segmentType) {
    var preferenceLevel;

    if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_MOST_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Most preferred");
    } else if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_LESS_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Less preferred");
    } else if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Preferred");
    } else {
        return null;
    }

    if (segmentType == SEGMENT_TYPE_HOTEL) {
        return getLocalizedMessage("{0} hotel for {1}", preferenceLevel, companyName);
    } else {
        return getLocalizedMessage("{0} vendor for {1}", preferenceLevel, companyName);
    }
}

My request was to avoid passing the segment type into the function and for the function to have hotel-specific code in it. Instead, I wanted to see the message template passed in, like this:

function getPreferenceLevelText(companyName, companyPreferenceLevel, messageTemplate) {
    var preferenceLevel;

    if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_MOST_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Most preferred");
    } else if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_LESS_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Less preferred");
    } else if (companyPreferenceLevel == PREFERENCE_LEVEL_PREFERRED) {
        preferenceLevel = getLocalizedMessage("Preferred");
    } else {
        return null;
    }

    return getLocalizedMessage(messageTemplate, preferenceLevel, companyName);
}

This means that the callers will need to specify the message template and hotel displays will pass in the hotel-specific template whereas other segment types will pass in the "vendor" message.

The developer on the team working on this asked me why I wanted to see this change, commenting that this approach was easy and kept the calling code terse and even allowed the segment type argument to be optional. I'll be honest, I had a hard time explaining all of the reasons why I wanted to see this change made.

Can you clearly explain the benefits of the change?