It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous.

I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.