Open market operations can't really be characterized as lending to banks. Instead, the Fed buys various kinds of debt, especially US govt bonds, thus injecting money into the economy. The fed funds rate is really the rate at which banks lend to each other. Banks are privileged in that they have a special legal mandate to act as banks, but they are not privileged in terms of access to credit (they can borrow at the "discount window" but this is less important than the Fed's open market operations).

But more importantly, QE is more like injecting money into "real things" since it is buying corporate debt that presumably funds real projects. So the (alleged) failure of QE is not very good evidence for your claim that standard monetary policy is bad.

EDIT: and they main reason I and most economists prefer US style monetary policy is that it's very neutral: you have a lever, and that lever is how much bonds you buy. You can choose various flavors of bonds, and various maturities, but they are all fundamentally the same. In contrast, the government directly funding real projects lends itself to corruption and favoritism.