So, you’re saying that if he fielded a 4085 team, which is what he’s capable of (yes, I checked), that it would have been easier to flip them?
Really?
War simply doesn’t work the way you think it does. They actually hurt themselves by doing that. What he set his defense team to had zero impact on matchmaking.
My alliance had an opponent once… clever dogs that they thought they were… well, they were mostly all higher level than us, and it showed in their roster and cup levels.
These wise guys brewed up what they thought was the most brilliant of brilliant plans ever conceived of. They put up a boatload of sub 3k defense teams on purpose, guarded from reset by only their strongest 4k+ teams. Figuring, “ha ha ha! Those fools will barely score any points by taking out our low defenses! And they will have to get through our biggest defenses in order to flip the board!”
Long story short. We beat them by about 5000 to 2500. 
Our low guys went in and one shotted all of their pretender defenses while our bigger teams took down their “big defensive walls”; rinse and repeat.
A full reset is worth 1500 points either way.
We laughed all the way to the bank.