First of all - I’m sure if Julian told you that - then he was just kidding around with you. Julian was always quick with a joke and a smile.
How true. But if he did say it as a joke, then it was my personal favorite kind of joke: No one at the table got it except for him, and he kept a straight face. 
It all happened later the same day of the funeral. When another person at the table - a SiHing of your training era and the person Julian addressed his comment - and one of the guys Sifu didn’t like 
- had the same reaction you did in your post by pointing out it was insulting to do that, that was the first time I expressed my point about you coming to pay your respects and the last time I ever needed to within the Moy family (but it’s not as if you, as a subject, come up all that often 
).
The other two times were: once to two former students of yours I met when they said you wasted a lot of time making unnecessary comparisons to Moy Yat (they were with you for maybe two years, tops), and once when someone posted a question on-line in a defunct forum soliciting opinions about you of which there was not a single response remotely favorable, save mine.
There is no question Moy Yat ‘loosened up’ as the years went by and relaxed a bit - he had already managed to “raise” several students and was reasonably satisfied with the result (regardless of whether they stayed). But, he was never personally happy about any of his students leaving the nest. (Relieved? Yes, sometimes. Happy? No.) But, to him as a SiFu, that’s the job he signed on for and already spent ten years in Hong Kong working at.
While I’m far from an expert on Moy Yat, perhaps because he knew I had taken care of quite a few foster children, SiFu and I actually had many conversations on this very subject addressing his entire teaching career.
Believe me, when the only fair and proper thing to do is treat each one as “your own” - and you don’t know if it’s going to be for six hours or six years or more - and you don’t know if they are one day old or fifteen years old until they are put right in front of you (chronological or training age) - or whether they are the the ones where you cannot stand them and long for the hour to give them back to someone, anyone - you don’t want to see them go. You can be happy for them when it comes (especially if it’s the right time), but you don’t have to like it. Sometimes it’s easier to deal with than at other times.
Regardless, if that’s the way one felt it needed to be done (as I do for my foster kids and he did for “his”), without the emotional commitment from the start, it wouldn’t work at all.
And, like his subtlety, Moy Yat never lacked for emotion, either. 