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Seems one of the problems is that the funding sources are run by too many old people. They should be forced out every few years and not be allowed to make a career of it.

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I'm just a grad student (but I've seen plenty of paper reviews and heard plenty of discussions at conferences), but at least in my corner of academia, the older and more established folks tend to be more visionary: they're more distant from the publish-or-perish scramble of assistant professorship and they've seen cycles of fads come and go. Of course a lot of younger profs bring fresh approaches too but IMHO the tendency to conform to 'accepted' topics to survive is much stronger on the early end of a career.

Anecdote of one, but my funder is quite old and he has taken us on even though our research is not quite in his vein. Moreover, our PI is super old but he's often pushing us to keep fusion in mind, although we are aware that really going down that road in our would be a tough sell for funders.

It isn't quite an age thing as much as it is a "establishment" thing. The establishment is, if you will, older and more established than any one individual, old or young.

In my area (AI), if anything I think the older people in funding bodies are more open to funding a large variety of work, because they've seen multiple cycles of hot techniques coming and going, and lots of eggs being put in a handful of baskets, so tend to think there's value in funding even long-shot and currently-not-hot areas in case something comes out of them long term. Younger people involved in these kinds of funding bodies are much more likely to be the ones pushing for funding to be highly concentrated in a handful of currently hot areas that have clear paths to near-term significant advances, the "we should put 100% of our funding into deep neural networks" type of strategy.

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