First, I think there's a lot of truth to the idea that NSA's primary motivation is headcount. I think that's an important and significant point that isn't raised often enough in these discussions. It has implications beyond vulnerability disclosure! (For instance: it's a very good reason to be wary of things like DNSSEC, that make it expensive but not intractable to attack Internet trust at its core).

But I don't know what you mean by your first paragraph, or by the notion that "cracking systems isn't going to lead to anything worthwhile".

Whats the distinction between hacking and cracking?

Some would like to promote 'hacking' as screwing around with things for fun/learning and 'hacking' as digital breaking and entering. Seems like an uphill battle to me but its probsbly useful to have a distinction.