But what if the actual bottleneck isn't the size of the various cohorts of people, but a bureaucracy that inflicts some irrational set of conditions that impedes competent operation? If so, then changing media won't help; whatever scheme you envision will fail.

I'm rather certain the FAA does indeed either employ or contract people that are capable of providing the solution. I'm also quite certain those people live in a perpetual blizzard of responsibility diffusion bullshit: the FAA is a venerable and highly risk-adverse operation. If someone told me it takes months of meetings and sign-offs to so much as log into a router and perform a benign check of some setting, I wouldn't blink.