It isn't nuts to try it if there isn't much downside. The donors are dead already, the person receiving is blind already. What's to lose? Money and some time and inconvenience?
Your misunderstanding of risk/reward is astounding.
People have surgery all the time for significantly less upside.
There is no chance it has no chance.
If you're saying you want to perform a full-head transplant on humans without ever succeeding on apes, people would very rightly call you delusional.
That's a stupid analogy. The downside would be death.
There are compassionate treatment exemptions for research procedures, but they need to have a snowball's chance in hell of working. It's nice that the people behind this think that this meets that bar, but I'll believe it when independent experts in the field can vouch for the procedure having a reasonable chance of working.
If they do, great, go for it. If they don't, no amount of rabble-rousing of the uninformed (people like me) should permit them to operate on humans.