I recently saw (1) and this brought it to mind - as someone who has written a few funded $250-500k grants, it's a very familiar feeling, and I assume it only gets worse when you get to RO1 and "infinite euromoney" levels.

1) https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/cgy6uz/comment/e...

On my first RO1, it was returned unscored (basically not even reviewed). It was a clever idea that was ahead of its time. the next year I noticed that the same section had several proposals which were effectively copies of mine written by more experienced PIs and at least one of them was funded even though they had no expertise in the area.

I left academia shortly after that (no interest in that competition) for FAANG and got more and better research done in my 20% time than I ever did in academia. I've spoken to many program managers who would love to fdund clever new ideas from creative young PIs, but are under strain to produce a reliable stream of papers from more experienced PIs who train postdocs.