Having begun going bald* in my early 20’s, I unexpectedly developed relatively strong feelings about other men’s hairstyles. Maybe that was tied into Mot’s motivation to become a barber. “You have hair and you do that with it? You ungrateful swine.”

*I lucked out there in that my head is not weirdly shaped.

Mott (or apparently “Mot,” according to the Memory Alpha wiki), was a Bolian, which means that he was bald and blue-skinned, which further means that his career choice was highly suspect. He shows up in a couple of episodes (notably Worf goes in for a trim and then is “triggered” by the sight of Mot’s scissors in the alien abduction episode “Schisms”) and is mentioned in a few others.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mot

And the 4chan hypothesis is as good as any.

As for your question of why the space probe wants to force people to play act the civilization’s mythology, I’m assuming it’s because the probe was created by that civilization’s equivalent of 4Chan.

What, I wonder, would persuade a civilian to take a non-specialist position aboard the Enterprise, aside from the thrill of almost being killed on a near-weekly basis?

Actually, as long as you’re not in uniform and don’t hang around the main characters too much, chances are your odds of being killed just to demonstrate how dangerous the crisis of the week is are not all that high. Whenever some poor nonentity gets killed on-screen in The Next Generation, it’s almost always some guy in a uniform on the bridge (and usually in a gold uniform, since the writers were trying to get away from their critics’ old “red shirt” jokes; as if such a superficial change really made any difference). The real question is what motivates those guys to put on a uniform when they could have taken up a much safer and more productive life in some civilian position on that same ship.