I contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money. Software (and hardware) projects were completed, and nothing was ever done with them. We produced over 20k pages worth of paperwork (which was all mandatory if we wanted to get the money), which I'm guessing no one ever read.

Don't get me wrong, it was all developed with good intentions, but those have been known to pave the road to hell. From a personal point of view, I learnt a lot from the experience. But there are probably more efficient ways for software engineers to learn than by doing FP7 projects.

I was just a cog in the machine, perhaps someone further down the pipe got some benefit out of what we were doing. But given how the projects were managed, I doubt it.