Not being the best doesn't mean they are bad. Any one of them could have been the second, third or fourth best option.
There's no reason they couldn't be the best option, but when you are taking into consideration irrelevant criteria for a higher, the odds of getting the best decreases.
But then you are back in the conundrum of the post that you didn't reply to from today. I will cut and paste:
"Zen, you keep treating this like the NBA draft and every candidate for a government job can be rank-ordered 1-30. If that were true, it would be easy to say something like "Hey, you picked the #7 ranked cabinet secretary with the first pick because he is black. What a terrible decision!"
But it doesn't work that way for most jobs. It is pretty easy to generate a pool of candidates that have equal qualifications for a given job."
If you have a large applicant pool, there are likely many qualified candidates that would all do the job well. There is no objective measure to decide amongst these folks, so
it doesn't matter what criteria you use to make your choice. There is no "one best option." There are tons of judgment calls - this one may write a little better than the others, but that other one is a slightly better public speaker, and the other one over there speaks three languages, but that other one is better at math, that one in the corner gets along slightly better with people they haven't met, and that one is better at delivering tough constructive criticism, that one grew up poor and has demonstrated that they can overcome adversity, this one... And on and on.
If it is not possible to ascertain the "best" candidate for a job but you identify a pool of candidates who
would all do a good job, then it doesn't matter what you use as the tie breaker.
(And that is before you take into account that there may be something about their unique background that is a factor that makes them better at the job they are being considered for. There are plenty of management studies that say diversity in backgrounds on, for example, an executive team is a good hedge against groupthink, which can degrade the effectiveness of an organization)