Keep in mind that, especially for government agencies, part of the goal of the RFP process is to avoid any question of descrimination by making the decision cri

Keep in mind that, especially for government agencies, part of the goal of the RFP process is to avoid any question of descrimination by making the decision criteria as "objective" and explicit as possible by making it possible to compare vendors along the same set of criteria. I agree that it's hellish (we fill out RFPs for claims and policy systems . . . thankfully we and not I), but it's not an easy problem to solve either. If you don't standardize responses somehow, such that every bid is ad hoc and difficult to compare to every other bid, it becomes very hard to defend yourself against accusations of partiality (and, naturally, much easier to actually discriminate). So yes . . . for both the government and private industry, the RFP serves as a CYA mechanism so you can say "we made the decision based on these factors right here" instead of "we made the decision because we just kind of liked this proposal better." But it's also an anti-favoritism, anti-discrimination mechanism, and it's hard to do that without some sort of standardization, which in turn pretty quickly leads to hellish, absurd RFPs.