It's only delusional if they can't find people to fill the jobs. The idea that, as an outsider, you know what requirements they should use in their hiring process better than they do is perhaps more delusional.
I worked in bioinformatics for more than 10 years before I moved on, and In my experience they do have a lot of trouble finding people to fill positions, especially outside of massive government funded groups like the NIH. This often results in passing on competent software engineers with a B.Sc. that don't meet the requirements in favor of PHD level biology graduates who have taken a year or so of undergrad computer science courses. In my experience, this leads to many of the problems discussed (and exaggerated) by the OP. While some of these people are smart and produce good work, much of the time they produce poor quality software that gets the job done, but as inefficiently as possible and they leave a code base that is virtually unusable. Overall, I mostly just wanted say that it's a mindset they REALLY need to get past for the long term success of the industry.
It's not really the money that's skewed, it's their idea about the person they need for the job. They don't need someone with that background (most of the time), they just need a junior level software engineer in which case the pay scale may not be too bad. There's a problem in realizing this, however, when the standards for your own field (molecular biology for example) are extremely high, so you expect it of all others as well...