I apologise for that, I did not mean a deliberate equivocation, I meant a fallacious/accidental equivocation. That was the closest term I could think of at the time. In retrospect 'false equivalence' or 'comparing apples to oranges' would have been a more accurate and less accusatory term.
The point is that doing something as a job is massively different from doing something as a hobby (or even from doing it as a volunteer, which I assume is a large part of the excluded middle you're referring to)