I was about to post something similar. A lot of the issues emerge from bad incentives. As the saying goes, "form follows finances", and once you understand the finances here, you can understand how it can go wrong.
In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers.
That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.
Agreed. I know of a single academic faculty who leads engineering research efforts with 40+ research faculty, 4 dedicated administrative staff, and 200+ doctoral students. Most students rarely interact with the PI and are really advised by research faculty. This one lab houses close to half of the doctoral students in that department. Now, I've never talked to the PI, but I imagine he's a decent enough person.
I have a strong feeling that academic research will lose its way since financial incentives attract money-driven faculty and disincentivise the pursuit of fundamental, academic research questions.
On the other hand, you'll get poorly-baked fundamental ideas from the faculty, like the idea that Wikipedia is the best source of knowledge because social consensus is the best way to figure out the truth, an idea which is explicitly advocated by a tenured faculty member at a major university and is clearly false because people are capable of lying. Empirical validation of mathematical models is actually the best way.
In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers.
That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.