The argument goes along the following lines: ``Give the managers or funding agencies a single figure of merit and they will use it blindly to promote or eliminate the wrong research.''
I think this is a red herring. Good managers, good scientists, and good engineers all know better than to rely on a single figure of merit. Second, there is a much greater danger in relying on intuition and expert assertion alone. Keeping decision makers in the dark has an overwhelmingly higher damage potential than informing them to the best of ones abilities.