I don't think you've ever worked in academia or research.

If you want to do cutting edge research you need money.

Try to do it in Italy, where an entire university has only one MRI working at 400 Mhz.

Then you go to EPFL, Switzerland, and a single lab has 15, I repeat, 15 .8 GHz MRIs.

Each of those instruments is in multi million $ range and requires expensive staffing and maintenance.

Then you need chemicals, you need an order for 6'000 $ worth of chemicals.

In Italy that's a lengthy and bureaucratic process.

When I was in EPFL, Switzerland, not even as a grad, but master's student, all it took was a half assed email and I would get everything I needed. No questions asked. Zero.

Need lab equipment? Every researcher and student had a "credit card", you'd go to the university shop and buy whatever you needed, no questions asked.

Hell, when I was in EPFL all it took me to get a GTX Titan X from Nvidia was to fill a form with my university email stating I needed it for research (I didn't, I used it for gaming), I had one one weeks later.

Do the same with the university email from Tor Vergata? When you truly need it for research? Laugh.

In US this abundance of resource is even higher, and it compounds.

Need some grad to help you? Her'es the budget. Need this? Have it. Need the most precise instrument of some kind on the planet? Book it.

I don't want to be harsh, but you're taking stances and having opinions on stuff you simply do not understand.

This isn't researchers being greedy, this is researchers understanding that if they want to do meaningful work, unconstrained, or less constrained, by budget reasons there is just a handful of places on the planet, half of them in the US.