I'd be curious what the impact of fewer but more voluminous grants would be on academia. As other commenters have noted this grant turns into roughly 1 student for 5 years working on the project for a professor. Even for this grant, you would expect that a professor would need 3-5 such ongoing grants to really keep the lab functional.

It took 2 weeks to craft this grant proposal. Assuming the average academic has a 30% hit rate and the average grant provides funding for ~1 year... then this translates to roughly 30 weeks per year. A somewhat extreme example, but I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers get worse as you move to lower tier universities - and better for higher tier universities.

Would it be better to simply grant lab's to researchers with a general research plan on a 3-5 year cadence?