My point was that the "hyper-meritocracy" the parent comment referred to is antithetical to the dystopia that Diana Moon Glampers represents. There's no point in ruthlessly optimizing for the best candidates if you're going to cripple them to prevent them from outperforming the worst ones. If this is a step towards a dystopia, it's a very different dystopia than the one Harrison Bergeron depicts.
That aside, I'm less cynical about this than either you or the parent commenter. While I wouldn't want my professional skill set to be my sole defining characteristic as a person, I'm perfectly content to let it define me as an employee, keeping in mind that attributes like ambition, creativity, and passion are components of that skill set. But I acknowledge that this may be the start of a slippery slope, and you may be right to say that I underestimate that risk because I haven't lived in a Communist state.
Thank you for the friendly reply. I genuinely do appreciate it.
As for why I see things the way I do, all I'll add is that if things do go the way that all other characteristics are stripped away, leaving nothing but one's professional skill set... Ok. Who decides what qualifies for what box? You should keep a very close eye on who the final arbiters are that get to decide what, exactly, a professional skill set is, and what checks and balances are in place to prevent them from abusing their position.
You may find that suddenly characteristics that you thought had nothing to do with one's profession are added or removed as is convenient for the power structure at large, or that capabilities that you would consider core to the job at hand no longer considered worthy due to opaque political decisions. Again, I'd love to be wrong about this. We'll see, I suppose.