A Language Pet Peeve
Life was better prior to "prior."
"Just prior to the tour's departure ..." Does this bother anyone else? What's wrong with "before," anyway? And doesn't "prior" have a retrospective feeling to it, like, an ordering you'd see looking back, not in anticipation?
"Prior to" just sounds prissy and pretentious to me. People seem to take a, dare I say, anal pleasure in pursing their lips to pronounce it.
LOL, Just last week I was in a fancy restaurant. In the restroom, the instruction to the employees was to wash your hands prior to returning to work. Exactly, "prissy," I thought, in a fancy font, a fancy frame. And then I saw below in a much smaller plain font, "Don't be gross. Wash your hands too."
More LOL, I just googled "don't be gross" and came up with a lot of signs for purchase with that slogan, but none with the "prior" '-) mandate to employees.
Even Merriam Webster agrees with you:
"Although prior to is occasionally criticized as a pretentious way of saying before, it is well-established in formal contexts, such as the annual reports of corporations. In some of these contexts, it serves to emphasize the procedural nature of something. "