Building rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.

The whole time when SpaceX didn't exist and NASA invested money in nonsense they could have invented reusable rockets, LEO constellations, nuclear reactors the list goes on.

I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.