I disagree with you. If there was excess manpower, graduate students wouldn't be stressed out with overwhelming work. Obviously, there is a lot more work to go around and less bodies to give it to. Most of the research man-hours is gone trying to implement other people's research-methods so you have a 'baseline.' A complete waste of time just to have one graph in the Results section of your publication. The height of research inefficiency is to replicate someone else's results and hope (finger's crossed) that you followed their 8-page paper (that took them 10 months to develop) meticulously. Academic researchers only care about results, it is the graduate students that need to be efficient. The efficiency software should be bought by the PIs for their graduate students.