I hear ya. I've been a programmer for over a decade and even though I'm making great money and it's intellectually stimulating, I'm essentially giving it all up and diving into biotech (studying now for an M.S. in Bio).

The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.

Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.

I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.

Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.

[1] https://freeradical13.github.io/