The problem is too many rules already. Agencies being frozen because they couldn’t get rid of rules just reminds me of that thing with monkeys unable to get their hands out of a jar because they won’t release the fruit inside. Pretty sure my dog could work out that level of problem.
The moonshot was solvable because there wasn’t a mile of preexisting red tape that a majority of normal people found somehow sacred. There merely was a lot of miles physically deadly to humans, and math to be overcome. (Hidden Figures is an awesome movie)
If lead in aircraft is such a huge deal, just show me the money. I suspect it’s like everything else in the world where it’s only a problem when someone else can be made to provide the time, effort, and money to fix it. In the meantime, we all pay for bureaucrats not to solve anything.
We are really in this situation because of lack of demand for new light aircraft and their engines. That’s a result of a combination of many things, but much of it is a seeming conspiracy to take the fun and utility out of light aircraft for over half a century. Additionally, innovation gets squashed because flying is so dangerous it justifies many pounds of regulation yet it’s the only industry where manufacturers have a right to build offending products ad infinitum.
We can do one thing for certain and stop building planes that require 100LL.