>The current IMM staff reminds me of work. In my current job,
>my less-than-agile-minded boss decided that his nephew would
>be great at a very important, critical job that he has no
>training and experience for and didn't ask for. So, he's
>thrust into the job, though his strengths lay elsewhere, all
>the time bumbling his way through something that he can't do
>well.

It's really not like that.

It's more like: If you're going to work for a branch of my company that's based in France, you're going to need to take some time and work on your French skills, even if the job you're doing is as say an engineer or customer service representative rather than as a translator. There isn't a job I can think of that someone can do to help CF that requires them to be an imm, that doesn't also strongly benefit from the knowledge gained in writing an area.

I'm not opposed to the idea of people doing some kind of smaller area project as a new imm if they were making big contributions in some other way, but without a good grounding in some of those areas, just about anything else you can do will either A) be much harder for you or B) make lots of work for other people on staff, offsetting some or all of your contribution, or both.