Animal, getting a useless, box checking master's degree is a personal choice. You shouldn't use the wide latitude the AF tuition assistance program gives you to get a master's degree in a subject that you care about, from a university that you choose, in a place and time that fits your needs, to bash the program for being a waste of time. If you want to use a program that teaches you nothing, takes little time and still meets the minimum standard required to qualify as an advanced academic degree (busywork, as you call it), that is your choice. A master's in business, military studies, international relations, history or government will help you be a better senior AF officer. The last thing people should want is commanders and boards discriminating the quality and location of your AAD for promotion to O-6. Setting the minimum standard relatively low for a subjective requirement prevents alma mater discrimination and bullshit assessments about how hard you worked to get your degree, or how often you were published, like we see in the academic world.
Hard work, success and competency are important at promotion boards, but an assessment of the ability to succeed in the next grade is also required. This assessment is subjective because it is predictive. We use stratifications and push lines to explain this assessment. Businesses don't promote merely based on hard work and success at current job. They may pay more to those with experience and a good record (like we do with pay increases in the same grade every two years), but they don't promote to upper management without considering whether they have the skills to succeed at upper management. Agree, we should be discriminating and selective about who gets promoted and I would argue that we are. But I also think the senior leaders need to be the people who determine how to discriminate and select, not the CGOs. What CGOs value at the time may not be what makes them successful at FGO responsibilities.
The best critiques we can make are to point out how our system needs to be improved and how we selected the wrong leaders should be based on the specific leader's shortcomings and leadership failures. When morale is low, unit performance is below standards, resources are wasted, and the mission is not being accomplished, there is an obvious failure of leadership (possibly at many levels) that must be corrected. I think AF senior leadership is trying to correct that rotten core of leadership in the missile community. We should reassess what we got wrong at promotion boards and command screening boards that predicted these officers would succeed when they clearly did not. A useful way for senior leaders to evaluate the performance of their subordinate commanders is to read the anonymous but honest opinions of that commander's subordinates and peers. Unit climate assessments, IG/congressional complaints, face to face feedback, informal feedback (including social media) can all give indications of leadership failures. 360 feedback should be implemented immediately for all commanders. I'm not sure why we are so reluctant to do this. Commanders and senior leaders should be held to higher, more stringent standards and their leadership abilities should be more formally evaluated.