The only reason the FAA delegates is because they could no longer pay a competitive salary to retain aeronautical engineering talent given the better pay in the private sector. So they delegated.

This completely missing the point of independent certification, validation, and acting as a proxy for the "customer of first resort" is the entire point of a regulator. If you can't sell an independently staffed regulator on your design, flying their own test regime, you shouldn't be making planes period. The new regime basically relegated the FAA to the role of paperwork auditor; a reactive instead of proactive regulatory process.