Acting on the numbers you get is not intrinsically a problem: it's what the action is. Looking at how fast stories, function points or whatever get closed is important for planning what you can get done in a given time, and that can be crucial for project management and managing customer expectations. It's not acquiring the information which is a problem; it's not using the metrics which is the problem. The problem is not understanding what the metric can be used to represent (project velocity), and what it cannot (individual productivity);
Those are not important at all, or the top software projects would be using them. Linux kernel is doing fine without the velocity point story tickets. Agile "planning" which is used in worse software projects is snake oil.
It may be useful to collect metrics to get insights, but if they are publicized as a measure of performance, it's likely they'll be gamed, making them less useful.
