Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options.
One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded).
What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.
This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.
There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.