Professionally, I disagree with your take on what it is we do. I don't know how many competitive billets you have held with a lot of peer competition (and if you have stood many, I'll bite my tongue) , but you are going to be a sad sailor if you think just having the"day job" down is going to put you on top of the deck.
I do not want to get into a penis envy contest on AW.
Instead, I'll focus on that we live in different communities, and you're wrong to ascribe what's important to yours to what is important to mine. You're also wrong to think that everyone is equally good at their "day jobs."
The most important things to the promotion screening boards (and I'd imagine any URL warfare community) are sustained superior at-sea performance and significant contribution to the community or Navy (at least that's what they say on Pers). Good luck accomplishing the latter if you're placed on the bench everytime you do an important exercise or conduct a risky mission operation. And since they highlight "at sea" performance, I doubt they are talking about the ability to maintain a perfect electrical safety inspection log.
Having a super-sat whammadine binder for some collateral duty might providea fitrep bullet that no one is going to read, but the important parts of our fitreps are the ranking and the attribute grades relative to the CO's average. Tactical performance, leadership, teamwork, command presence/bearing all relate to our 'day jobs' leading a watchteam to do what we colloquially refer to as "God's work," not the super-sat whammadine motorcycle safety binder. And last I checked, my watchteam's ability to drive a ship and accomplish the task at hand while not crashing into a stationary or moving object has a direct relationship with whether my CO gets to keep his job.
At the DH level and above the priority starts to shift a little to being able to more administrative-oriented tasks -- ability to meet ship's schedule, preparing the department for the next event, performance on inspections, etc...but all of those would fall under "primary duties" and not "collateral duties." Additionally, you must be command qualified to continue in your career, which is entirely 'day job' based.
In the end, we have to prove that we are worthy of being a CO...that we can train a crew to safely drive the ship to sea and conduct whatever mission tasking is handed to us...from ISR to strike to approach and attack. All of those are 'day job' skills. CO's don't get fired because the motorcycle safety officer binder is outdated, they get fired for hitting other objects (or screwing the help or 'ordering' the ombudsman to post a picture with secret material on facebook).
Warfighting readiness first. Everything else is secondary.
