My guess is that Fred isn't going to be giddy about being taken off the main codebase.

The idea that he might be good at the plumbing doesn't mean he wants to do it.

There's also the danger that you end up with endless churn in your plumbing, testing, etc, tools instead.

I get the gist of the article, but sometimes you have to face the hard reality that there's a bad match between a team's needs and a team member's desires.