Agreed. Two of these "most fundamental" questions you don't need to concern yourself with as a proposal writer: "What is the problem being tackled?" and "Why is the problem worth being tackled?" are the ones that have been decided for you as part of the call for proposals. At least that's how it works when asking for public money for research funding in most European research programmes.
It's more like:
Researcher: I want to spend the next 20 years continuing the work I have been doing for the past 20 years, please.
Politician: Actually, I want to decide what it is you work on, and I decide based on what I can sell to the public. The public decides what's important to them based on what the mass media write about in a favourable light. The mass media have the attention span of a headless chicken on speed. So expect research priorities to be frequently changing and calls for proposals to not make any sense.
So the system that has evolved around that is to make calls for proposals like "Improve citizen participation in paneuropean policy making through next-generation digital tooling."
"Citizen participation" is the part of the bullshit bingo that the politician needs to argue that the research billions are well spent. "Next-generation digital tooling" is the part that is intentionally super-vague and is the part of the bullshit bingo that the researcher needs, so that he can attach whatever he has been working on for the past 20 years to this newly-minted agenda.
So the job of the proposal writer is to weave the two narratives together: If you've been working on compression algorithms, tell a nice story about how citizens use mobile phones to call their representatives in Brussels, about how mobile phones use compression algorithms, and about how improved compression will therefore lead to improved citizen participation in paneuropean policy making.
In the next cycle, the call for proposals might be "Sustainability 2030: Reducing the carbon footprint of the European digital infrastructure backbone". Go ahead and write about how every bit of a data packet requires electricity to process and about how improved compression will reduce the electricity consumption of digital infrastructures.
Then: Ask yourself who will likely end up reviewing the proposal, and work in as many flattering citations of them as possible.
You really don't need to demonstrate that any of it makes any scientific or economic sense. You just need to pick up on the language game that people in power are playing and demonstrate that you'll participate in it as a willing pawn.
P.S.: When calls have low acceptance rates, the deciding factor is cronyism, not superior substance of a proposal or even superior proposal writing ability. Having the politically-favoured (i.e. quantitatively underrepresented) set of genetalia also helps.