Talent does tend to gravitate to where the money is. And, very often, most problems require a solution that involves personal courage, political will, and lots and lots of money.
I freely admit, as a patron of the military-industrial complex, that funding is important for speedy development. But perhaps
because I was raised by two government contractor employees in a city that would blow away were it not for government technology contracts, I sometimes see the extent that some of these "what ifs" take money=progress to ridiculous extents.
Like the guy in a recent thread who argued that Nazi germany, had it won by 1943, would have had uber-super space planes by the late forties, a moon base (with ICBMs that would control the world

) by the early fifties, and a man on Mars by 1960. His proof? A book (not in english) that said that Germany had a plan to put research as a top priority under the SS, with over a TRILLION reich marks allocated towards it, and the fact the the German rocket scientists would not be moved to the US or Russia.
Technology doesn't work like that. It isn't some magical formula "add one piece HOC4, three ClR2 under temperature X", that can be found by trying all the possible combinations. For example, if the exact composition of the US B-2 bomber, stealth pain and all, were released on the internet, most nations would not be able to build it for YEARS, perhaps closer to a decade, because they wouldn't have the infrastructure. They wouldn't have the infrastructure to build that infrastructure either.
To build it, not only would they have to train up a load of people for the various tasks (which requires its own infrastructure), but they would have to build the infrastructure to build the infrastructure to test the data received from the test that requires its own infrastructure, and then make new infrastructure (often dissembling the old) to build ANOTHER attempt, and so on.
It's more than money; it's TIME. It takes time to set up tests, it takes time to take data, time to analyze data, time to figure out a new test, and more. Just as it takes time to figure out what to do with that new chemical mixture you just invented; is it the next dishwasher detergent, or a rocket fuel? If a rocket fuel, is it powerful and stable, or liquid death? You have to test and figure these things out as you proceed, with no way of knowing if they work or not. Technological development is not a blueprint that you automatically follow, its a mountain of possibilities you have to make something out of without knowing what the building blocks are.