There are going to be a lot of people in this self-selected group who will have had experiences with gifted education or, like myself, felt the distinct lack of those opportunities.

In my own case, I grew up in a rural area with very small schools and limited resources, what was available for enrichment was likewise limited but thankfully included at least libraries and access to computers and eventually the pre-Internet network community.

I don't believe in meritocracy in education--I saw enough inequality of opportunity to disabuse me of the notion that achievement in education at every stage was simply because the cream rose to the top. The best student of mathematics I ever knew became a surveyor because that was the career available to him--he HAD to be earning a living within three months of graduation. Exceptional ability, for him, meant only that he had the option of a less physically demanding job. Regarding real meritocracy on the achievement side there are enough stories like https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1494369809538195456 or almost any female PhD can relate if you care to listen to hopefully convince anyone that meritocracy is certainly suspect if not absent in education.

If it is not a meritocracy then what is the purpose of the highly competitive educational system including gifted programs? There is almost always some element of talent to be sure but there is also the luxury to pursue the opportunity, willingness or eagerness to compete, additional resources spent in preparing for admission and even just motivation or focus on the opportunity. Not all of this is dependent upon the individual, as others have pointed out, but also on parents who try get the best for their child. Perhaps the competitive system exists to make it easier for resourceful competitors to apply influence to get the result they desire.

I would prefer to see efforts which reduce the value of pursuing the competitive game. Why not self-paced programs available to anyone? Why not MOOCs? The self-selective participation even in high profile MOOCs like Sebastian Thrune's Stanford robotics MOOC points towards interest and self-motivation being the most important determiners. This seems like something we should want to reward. Maybe the reward for completion of MOOCs should be more individual attention up to and including enrolment. Perhaps there were even those who thought that self-enrichment was an inferior choice to more traditional approaches for optimizing educational competitiveness. Should we really reward that?

The threshold problem of competitive programs has always bothered me as well. Rather than a bright line threshold maybe we should be using chance to select amongst candidates; the higher the competitive score, the more likely your admission, but near the "solely by ranking" threshold choose among those above and below it with some degree of randomness. Why? Not just because it is unreasonable to regard the ranking criteria as infallible, but because selection on a narrow criteria is an imperfect determinant of outcome. Increasing the breadth of people who can enter the program will improve the selection of people who are motivated to apply and encourage applicants to try again. (Certainly I am only suggesting that programs only accept people which a high chance of completion in the program). Again, self-selection will drive those who really want it versus those who might be "qualified" on a competitive basis but actually disinterested. It grieves me when I hear of people graduating from highly competitive research physics programs or similar to go off and be a quant at some bank. Not because of my hatred of banks but because producing a quant is a wrong outcome for a competitive physics program; what the hell is the point if it doesn't make research physicists as promised?