That. And what was wrong with the other players that any two people could force anyone into doing what they didn't want to do? Two people is not a dominant "voting bloc" unless it was a three-player or maybe four-player game, and I doubt the twosome were regularly bullying anyone. Was the rest of the group a bunch of brand new players or something?
And really, if it wasn't for the eight-page backstory, would anyone even have known these were updated older characters without explicitly being told so? They were re-built using the campaign's rules and would have been perfectly legal as new PCs, right? This was a play style issue, not something actually involving mechanics or past history with a Monty Haul DM or something.