You keep dodging the fact that your definition of merit bluntly accepts the status quo as somehow neutral and "natural", which it isn'y in any way. Even if you accept that there is real discrimination, you refuse the very idea that discrimination is dependent on how it's received. Your belief in somehow documenting the "facts" of social interactions just goes to show how you're attempting to apply a form of positivist logic to a field where it's entirely unsuited.
Also: please stop using silly straw man arguments. The whole point here is the nuances, and nobody is arguing for the abolition of "discrimination" in the overly broad form you're using it in. What
is being promoted is the idea that concepts such as "merit" aren't as simple as they might seem (or you make them out to be), and that many different kinds of context are entirely invaluable in understanding and judging merit.
Another thing you'd do well to avoid in the future: false equivalencies. Living with racism is not the same as being bullied in school, which is not the same as living as a woman, which is not the same as being laughed at as a kid for having ears that stick out. Of course, everyone reacts differently to this (due to an unaccountable myriad of factors), but on average, one can quite clearly tell apart the severity of various kinds and degrees of discrimination and mistreatment.
Then, of course, there's your denial of systemic discrimination. You keep talking about this as if it a series of isolated incidents. Culture isn't a series of isolated incidents, but all interconnected, and our bodies and minds form a large part of these connections. If a person has, say, been bullied while growing up, and is thus more sensitive than someone who wasn't to overtly aggressive behaviour in the workplace, should they then simply accept being passed over and given fewer opportunities than their aggressive, assertive colleagues? Is that fair? No. If people acting in a certain way have beaten you up regularly when growing up, your body and mind will both remember this, and react accordingly when encountering similar behaviour. Another, very different example: if someone (a woman, a person of color, whatever) is being pelted with various comments referencing their gender/ethnicity/other attributes not at all relevant to their job every day by various coworkers, is it not reasonable for this to affect them? Is it not reasonable for them to be sad or angry about this? It's not like they can reasonably control or change the attributes in question, after all. Doesn't the fault then lie with the people making these comments, no matter how innocent their intent? So, should they then just accept that it's their lot in life to be put upon by their peers, accept that they're worth less, and shut up? Or would it be reasonable for them to say "Hey, maybe stop making boob jokes every single time I'm in the room?". I'd say the latter. And, if people are unable to comply with a simple request like this, yes, repercussions should be expected.
As for you stating that ""Feelings" (...) are not appropriate in the professional environment.", well ... wow. Really? Are you actually arguing that it's at all possible for people to interact without feelings being a part of the picture? I suppose this might apply to sociopaths, but for anyone else, that is entirely impossible. And thus, as professional environments are also social environments (as are all environments, really),
of course feelings and the discussion of them is entirely appropriate here, just as they are anywhere.
Regarding your statements that you can't change people's character: don't be daft. People change constantly. Our values, ideas, norms, and personality traits evolve
every single day. Of course, changing fundamental personality traits is
difficult, and with some of them so difficult as to be impossible in all practical terms, but our brains are immensely plastic and adaptive. It is entirely possible for someone to stop being rude, sexist, racist, or anything else.
When it comes to
@mtcn77 's post, you're right that I don't understand the specifics of it (I haven't touched the natural sciences since high school, thankfully), but that's not at all required to understand the complete failure of logic that post presents. You can't just transfer the laws of thermodynamics or principles of what "enables work" in a chemical system into an organization and expect that to function as a workable metaphor for an organization existing under an entirely different set of rules (culture, not physics). (As an aside: he even attributes Intel's current woes to Anita Sarkeesian!?! What? Did she make their 10nm process fail? Am I missing something here? This is, quite simply, an entirely misplaced and unworkable metaphor or analogy. It doesn't fit. Period.) In chemistry, you work with known substances of which you have a rather comprehensive understanding of their traits. They're also rather homogeneous (all atoms of the same element are structured similarly, and so on). People, on the other hand, are fundamentally heterogeneous (even within demographic groups, unless you specify them down to such a small level that they become meaningless), we don't have even close to a complete understanding of each others' traits, and last but not least: outside of a scant few possible changes, molecules and chemicals are
far less complex than humans in that they don't have
lives. They don't change or evolve over time, they aren't shaped by what happens to them (outside of a limited set of reactions, mostly making/fusing them into something else or gaining/losing electrons), and they don't work differently based on those experiences. An iron atom is an iron atom no matter the cycles of change it's "experienced". It's not going to act as an argon atom because of its experiences. People don't work that way, and hence, organizations made out of people don't work that way. The laws of thermodynamics apply to systems where thermodynamics are relevant to their functioning. The only way that applies to people is that we couldn't exist as we currently do without these laws; other than that, they don't matter.
Also, it's kind of funny how you claim to champion this supposedly "objective" definition of merit (seriously, there is no such thing outside of pure abstraction, which isn't really useful unless you're a philosopher), and call yourself out as being a hypocrite for not wanting to work with people you don't like. A
far superior solution there would be to admit that
merit isn't such a static entity as you claim it to be, and that interpersonal relations (such as the ability to work together productively, or stand to be in the same room as each other) also factor into what constitutes merit. In any type of cooperative setting, the ability to cooperate is in and of itself a part of what constitutes merit. If you're coding alone, from scratch, that's (largely) a situation where "merit" would be only the quality of the code you produce. However, if you're working on a code project with someone else - even someone anonymous, who you never see, hear, or even communicate directly with - the definition of merit changes due to the simple fact that the work being done has become more complex. Now it's not coding alone, it's coding together. Those are fundamentally different things, and need to be treated as such. If you refuse to accept this, you're not doing anything but willfully blinding yourself to the inescapable realities of living and acting in a complex, interconnected world.
I research games for a living. Please don't talk to me as if I don't know or care about crunch time. Caring about one thing does not negate the possibility of caring about other things. Solving crunch time requires unionization of the programming workforce, which is thankfully starting to happen, but it's slow as all hell. Thankfully things
are improving, at the very least, even if the current situation is entirely unacceptable.
Being intrinsically linked to corporate life and corporate culture doesn't have to mean adopting corporate culture in its entirety (such as, as you point out, the risk-aversion and bureaucracy of large corporations), but that doesn't negate the need to adapt to your own development. Linux isn't a tiny, "rebel" OS any longer, and it needs to stop acting like it is. That ship has sailed.
So no programmer ever studied existing code to learn how to write their own? Programming projects don't have style guides? Yeah, sorry, I don't buy that. Even if seasoned programmers rarely read other people's code (unless they're working on the same part of the same project, I suppose), they've formed their "language" by studying the work of others and adapting it to their own desires. Also, isn't having "identified a problem and (...) looking for a solution" cooperation when another person made the thing with the problem? Particularly when the changes have to be accepted by the original developer? Yes it is. This is, however spaced out and nodal, a community. People are interacting, making things together, communicating. This is a community.
Conservativism doesn't generally lead to good things either. Over the last centuries, conservatives have fought to preserve slavery, fought against democracy, fought against the right of everyone to own property, against the implementation of laws to prevent the wealthy abusing the poor, against women's rights, civil rights, and LBGTQI rights. Thankfully, they've (mostly) lost these fights. In the meantime, the world has progressed immensely in every single metric (outside of environmental damage; we've yet to fix that, sadly). Your statement is ahistorical in the long term, and pessimistic in the short term. Who is to say that this won't lead to an influx of capable developers who have previously avoided involvement in this community because of its toxicity? That is just as likely as what you're proposing.
Good to see that even with an at times heated debate, people are capable of listening to each other (and I sincerely hope this carries across the other way too - I know I tend to come off as harsher/more argumentative than I intend, and I'm working on it! 
) and actually finding points of commonality. I really don't think the disagreements here are as large as they tend to come off (though there are of course some points on which we are diametrically opposed, those seem to be relatively few), and personally I find it very rewarding to read the arguments of people who see things differently than me - even if this tends to lead discussions off-topic from time to time 
