Social darwinism is inescapable.

With taxes funding the work, there will be some (aggregate) metric to decide who gets the grants, and some committee to decide said metric and apply it. Which inevitably leads to corruption, both in directly gaming the metric and in greasing the committee wheels to choose the metric that favors certain kind of projects, certain kind of credentials, and/or certain socio-ethno-economic identity markers of the authors.

While the capitalist system is nakedly brutal, at least offers a skilled, determined and lucky person the opportunity to spend a part of their career earning (temporary) financial independence, and then spend it to finance their own projects.