Thank-you for continuing to share your trials and experience. I'm happy to see that you are finding improvement to your lipid panel results.
The cardiologist must not have felt it ethical to recommend another regimen, or maybe his insurance tied his hands and he was left with the security of only the two drugs you mention...or that he mentioned.
There are other options. When I got fed up with my weight, heartburn, and a heart giving me more fibrillation than it had in previous years, I decided to try a low carb diet. Inside of three months I lost 22 pounds, and my lipid panel got so good that my GP expressed surprise and pleasure at the greatly improved results. It helped that I was also still walking about 40 km each week at a fairly brisk pace, so I was maintaining both fitness and the regimen that promotes the benefits of aerobic exercise on lipids.