Thomas Shey
Legend
I'd say in Traveller it amounts to whatever fiat the group agrees on over choice of which characters they go on to play. The rules offer slightly contradictory notions about that. In one place it says
but immediately goes on to suggest that
This idea of "so poor as to be beyond help" is a nod toward prioritising optimisation. I think a position that robustly upheld that the two are never incompatible would have ended the paragraph at the earlier sentence.
In our Gamma World days, we had a term for that: "swordbushing", as in, a character throwing themselves on a swordbush when they were just awful (since as I recall the very first edition of GW had the roll-straight-up method, and at least could end up saddling a mutant character with weak benefits and strong deficits.
However, returning to Traveller, its still doesn't change the fact its exceedingly difficult to optimize toward, well, anything in it because there's so much randomness in it. If you go in trying to build a technician, you could end up with a medic instead--might even be a pretty good medic, but that wasn't that much help in trying to optimize toward an electronics-baseds repair and security specialist. The only way to do that is either to ignore the random elements in generation, or to roll characters repeatedly until you get what you want (and if you're genuinely trying to optimize, rather than just get a character who is suitable for a particular purpose, that would have to be a lot of rolls).