Great article. I agree with your take on this, and would probably go further: every major professional industry requires at least some degree of conformity; otherwise there's no consistency of work product, there's no collegiate culture, etc. etc. But this comes at a cost, because in order to create the required level of homogeneity, other forms of individual expression have to recategorised as taboo or wrong or misguided. And that's a very powerful tool, and quite scary if you decide to follow a different path...