Interesting, but the characters are written rather poorly. Especially Sisko is so far off from how he was portrayed in the TV series, for him to act so Machiavellian all of a sudden just doesn't make any sense.
Sisko always had a streak of pragmatism and disregard for the fussy niceties of Starfleet maxims that Picard so embodied. As an early first season episode put it
Q {having set up the premise of a boxing match}: You hit me! Picard never hit me!
Sisko: I'm not like Picard.
Consider that it was Sisko who set in motion the events that secured the Romulan alliance on false premises in "In the Pale Moonlight." To be sure it was Garik who provided the intrigue--but Sisko countersigned it.
I haven't read the story in question; you are probably right that it is off the rails.
Equal Employment Opportunity, or Equal Education, something like that. I don't like the implication that such measures are inappropriate, outmoded or silly myself. If capitalism is to be a good basis for society, it definitely needs some democratic public interest checks and balances on it. That such things can be badly handled is all too self evident but it is an important institution to have, and try to implement reasonably.
The point is, it looked to the person who wrote that that someone just took a bureaucratic checklist of ethnic categories and threw them together willy-nilly without bothering to create actual characters to embody them first. Like an American WWII movie always required a corn-fed white Protestant country boy, a wisecracking delinquent from Brooklyn, some ethnic other city boy, and maybe an American Indian. Oh, and some Southerner. One might mix and match a bit, but every squad had to embody the great Republic.
Again, not a terrible thing actually. I think the war really did have some such effect on soldiers. It may be bad history and bad art but it is iconic of certain values.
It is not an illegitimate starting place. One should then follow through of course.
For what it's worth I've enjoyed quite a number of
Voyager episodes. I suppose I have the right degree of infection with Political Correctness to do so.