I've often felt that there is something inherently unwholesome about PhDs and the modern academic effort. As if we could create research factories, and that the quality and quantity of discoveries would scale with input (money). I'm not a historian of science, but I do know that many of our greatest scientists were not professional researchers, doing the work essentially in their spare time on the side (Einstein, Newton) or more typically, because of the support of a wealthy patron. Contributors self-selected for passion and talent mixed with a juicy problem. It makes sense to park people with passion and talent but NOT a juicy problem into a teaching position until that problem ripens. But instead you get careerist, low-impact papers - even negative-impact papers if you taken into account the impact on signal-to-noise ratio such papers have.

Consider that one of the more important papers in CS in the last 20 years was "Attention is all you need", which was a side-effect of the authors day jobs. Or the many contributions of open-source which are 99% hobbyists. There is some sort of perversion that happens when you "fund research" - it removes the spontaneity and changes the selection criteria from something "natural" (passion and time and results) to something "synthetic" (grant application). It would seem to me a more sensible approach to become a car mechanic or programmer and do your original science on the side.