The two types of projects don't compete for the same pool of money. There's some overlap, but there's some funding that goes to specific goals on their merits,

The two types of projects don't compete for the same pool of money. There's some overlap, but there's some funding that goes to specific goals on their merits, and then there's some funding that could be pulled in if the project captures someone's interest (including public). As for buying human time, happily that often comes with a big discount for work on cool stuff (a fact routinely abused by businesses in some sectors, such as game development or entertainment in general). There's also an extra discount for trustworthiness - it's much harder to fake results when the evaluation criteria include whether or not it's the cool stuff that was promised.