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You're onto something here. Where I did my degree, the following was pretty much understood by all the students after their first few years:
The purpose of research grants is to get research done for the funder more cheaply than is possible in other sectors of the economy.
The purpose of Professors is to get funding and write grant proposals. This means anticipating what research will be trendy and making a lot of friends among the people who staff grant proposal review committees.
The purpose of the older graduate students is to do the research, write papers, and write grant reports, while mentoring the younger students.
The purpose of the younger students is to study and learn, while assisting the older students on writing grant reports and doing experiments. Oh, and to teach undergraduate classes.
Graduate students needing additional mentorship must actively seek it.
(We didn't have post-docs or research staff, but they basically allow scaling of the grant-writing work and supervisory work of professors.)
This was a decent system for graduate students who were self-driven and capable. It had many different failure modes, however: It rewarded professors for just enough surface level knowledge to come up with cool sounding projects that were in reality infeasible. It was hell for students who were given the new projects, because they had no mentors in their specialty, and had no idea that things were infeasible. Older students could be abusive or predatory, and unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results. Professors had a bias for sudents running simple but creative experiments over meticulous work that was actually necessary long term for good engineering.
Like you, I had a professor with only a surface-level knowledge of my research domain. I was often given bad advice and advice that wasted time. (The students figured out that our PI didn't read papers, but read abstracts and skimmed figures, which made for some funny misinterpretations of the literature.) The PI's feedback on student work was vague and hard to understand. However, when it came to overcoming stuck research projects my advisor was a genius. The experiment-breaking result became the new goal of the experiment, easily publishable. My advisor also eventually communicated an understanding of how to write a good research paper, after which all those vague comments suddenly made perfect sense. So the relationship turned out quite valuable.
The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.
Overall, it was a fun time, but I would probably recommend a gap year after a masters degree instead of a PhD. Travel the world, get more life experience, suffer less stress, have more fun, and in the end you didn't spend four years becoming the world's foremost expert in some experiment that is only performed in one lab.
Did you swap older/younger here?
No. In the specific incident that comes to mind we had an new student try to take credit for the results of a 3rd year PhD candidate after fixing/running the nearly-successful experiment while the older student was at a conference. Thankfully the PI saw through it. I'm sure it goes the other way too, though.
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Jesus that sounds horrible. Fortunately, I don't think things are quite that bad in my friend's lab, but her PI is known to play favorites. There is definitely a ton of political BS.
It was horrible. I only survived because I had a supportive romantic partner. I was under so much stress that my hair whitened. Apparently stress kills melanocytes.
Are you willing to give us a vague description of your field? I am guessing life sciences or maybe synthetic organic chemistry.
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