I believe this is the usual tension that's present even in private companies: are professional managers better than field experts at managing work?

The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!

The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts? A great manager would be great, but these are similarly rare (rarer than good experts in a field).

And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.

The same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.