Great design is much less subjective than people think. A good creative director will be able to look at a portfolio and recognize quality, much like a tech lead can look at someone's code and see if it's good.

Yep. A lot of the cultural luxuries programmers enjoy stem from the fact that there's a binary arbitrator of "correctness". Code will either output something that contains the required data, or it won't.

Within programming, there is plenty of room for taste and finesse and snobbery at higher levels of abstraction, but the field is naturally gated for us by a hard meritocratic absolute. In most fields, it's not that way at all.