The article talks about the believe in meritocracy, because true meritocracy doesn't exist.
For example, the gnome team had tons of good contributors over time. But nobody have time to keep going back to work they have already done. Then a new designer leader show up, with lots of free time, and start to churn out bad design on top of bad design, all to make gnome a mac clone.
Now, in your rosy vision of the world of open source meritocracy, who would judge merit? in real life, nobody did, and since the new designer had more free time than anybody else (is free time merit?) the awful designs moved on and people adopted the new osx-clone vision, and the community voice was mostly shunned away as not having enough merit to complain.
> People wouldn't tolerate that mentality when engineering bridges or building automobiles
you would be surprised how contracts for urban infrastructure are selected. In most places of the world there is a bribe mafia. And cars are mostly marketing for stagnant design (e.g. dashboard and bodywork design is lead by clay sculptor on every single company. Why do you think most dashboard designs are useless-ly round and fluid? because people want that or because the clay sculptors like to design it that way?)
