Not sure who downvoted this, but this is 100% on the money in my experience.

People here are writing comments like that funding should be tied to "how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is" as though these things are correlated to the existing criteria at all.

Much of the criticism here is like someone who knows how to build roads criticising agile software development because it makes it look like no one knows what they are going to build in the end. It's frustrating, and wrong, but the errors are subtle and aggregative.