Problems as of late (10th planet enthusiast who trains at self defense school)

Here is my story.

I compete all the time. I love the sport of submission grappling. I am under a school that under an affiliation that is known for focusing on self defense. In 2017, I received my purple belt. I received my blue belt from a school that was under a vey respected sports affiliation. The school I was apart of fell apart and I stopped training for a few years. In 2015 I found a school and started training and competing again. I primarly compete on my local circuit and have had a lot of success doing so. I go to school full time for Computer Science/Computer programming and work two jobs. It's a lot of work but I love every second of it. I also only have about a year or so left of school.

I have always been pretty open minded on techniques and I have always been a bit of 10th planet enthusiast. In 2015 when I came back I was working a lot of different stuff on top of what my instructor was teaching ( he primarily teaches the basics). For a while no one cared what moves I was doing while i was live rolling. I would drill my teachers moves, roll using whatever I need to, and go on with my day. Time goes on I get promoted to purple. I am still doing the same thing. A year goes by and my friend asked me to show him some things from rubber guard. I showed him some very simple stuff from mastering the rubber guard. It remined me how much I love playing rubber guard.

Few days later We start live rolling after drilling. Well I start using rubber guard and end up tapping a quite a few of my schools purple and blue belts with it (no white belts involved with this). I triangled few of them from the meat hook, hit a few omaplatas and If I remember right I think I even dead orchard someone.

This is when it started. After that day various members of the gym making comments about me using "too much sport". I kept using rubber guard with a lot of success (this in Gi and No-Gi). Various training partners have continued to make comments about it (a few of the higher belts were very impressed). Most of the people making negative remarks are all close to the same rank as me(We have a lot of purple and blue belts). It's still happening pretty frequently.

Then about a month ago a bunch of my instructors and training partners go out to eat. Are head instructor makes a comment of "I really want to progress you to the next belt level however you aren't really focusing on self defense and various other things. You need to roll like *insert name of affiliation*. " Well I didn't really think to much about it until I looked to the right of me and saw my one of my good friend and training partner had this look on his face. It was the look of "Did you really need to say that?" I didn't respond I just said " Well okay".

So in short
I am not being promoted because I use to much sport, I am beating most of the gym, I am doing well competing and I am having a blast doing so. Not to mention genuinely don't care about learning the curriculum self defense being forced on me.

So my question is. Is this a common occurrence? and do I listen to my teammates and blend in or tell everyone to go screw themselves?