You'd think someone would notice how this process is suboptimal and either come up with a way to make the process better, or at least a way to have a single poi

You'd think someone would notice how this process is suboptimal and either come up with a way to make the process better, or at least a way to have a single point of contact with knowledge and experience (and reputation) to deal with this for you, i.e. on a more local governmental level. As a random citizen, you'd perhaps get away with an online self-service form, as a small company or startup you might need a form and an interview, but the entire "talk to 4 different agencies at different levels of abstraction" seems like a waste of time for everyone when it can be done in one go (provided the thing you wanted to do is common enough that it doesn't require some extreme documentation and safeguards etc). If 100000 people were to want to try out a potato canon, it should be sufficient to do something at a local level where you select "I wanna play with a potato canon for a bit" in some drop-down, and it might ask you if you intend to shoot at people or not, and if you have enough room to experiment with this without hurting anyone (including yourself). If yes, problem solved, no need to fill out a form, if unsure or no, fill out a form since you probably are doing something novel, or something you might not want to do. If this then means some other agency at some other level needs to get notified, sure, automate that, who cares. If it turns out you filled out your form and specified radio active potatoes, perhaps one of those other agencies might want to have a chat first to see if everything is okay. But the default of "talk to an arbitrary number of agencies in every case" is not great.