The people running the bureaucracy are all the type of people inclined to work in a bureaucracy. Otherwise, the institution would reject them like a virus. Only a small percentage of people inclined to do well as pilots share the personality traits the bureaucrats have.
That may sound obvious and unimportant, but I challenge everyone to think about that whenever these issues come up. The military has spent a LOT of money trying to to figure out its own version of this problem but cannot get itself to change. There’s actually a type of personality nicknamed “Field Marshal” by psychologists which the US Army manages to weed out or transform early in their careers. Oops.
To put it simply, even the pilot population we have has been shaped by the system through culling and grooming to be compliant with bureaucracy. The bureaucrats have in no significant way been affected by the needs of aviation. They think many of us are simply wrong headed and see no reason we shouldn’t just be weeded out. Pointing out how the system doesn’t work right just shows them that pilots are problematic, not that they are incompetent.