I think the same idea extends into many other areas of government. The bureaucracy is set up to give the appearance that nobody is taking advantage of the system, and optimizes only for this outcome. So ironically, only those who devote their time to learning how to take advantage of the system are rewarded.

The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services).

In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.