If you are the kind of person that might be able to figure out what the brain is doing, chances are a company is going to pay you better and provide more resources to you than just about any university.
Depends on the resources. Amazon undoubtedly has much more compute, but they’re not exactly known for their wetlab facilities—-and this question undoubtedly needs both.
That said, I think you are right that academia’s structure may need to change. Right now, we’re locked into a model where projects mostly need to be doable by a handful of researchers (almost entirely trainees) in a few years. Other than these time-limited positions, there’s not a lot of room for skilled individual contributors, which seems goofy when tackling such a hard problem.
