[auggierose]

There is no good intrinsic metrics for research, we can agree on that. Impact on society is not a good measure either, because if you had funded 10 smaller research projects instead of one big one, you might have gotten a much bigger impact on society, but not so easy to measure and attribute, and maybe not as quick to do the impacting.

So yes, bureaucracy. Because instead of actually doing the job that needs to be done, the EU is more interested in covering their own asses so that it looks as if they were doing the job. But the EU is not special in any way here, except that it is a very big example of a bureaucracy, of course.