It all comes down to money in the end - you can underfund the CAA and wonder why it starts to struggle or you can cut costs in Mil aviation because doing it properly costs a lot - then you paper over the cracks with...errr paper, neverending reams of more complex requirements, none of which address the actual issue of airworthiness but simply make it look like so many people working hard must be making things safer.
More a case of cause and effect I'd say. The CAA has been reduced by the rise of EASA to which much of its expertise and knowledge has gone. Even so it remains
AFAIK self funded, much to the pecuniary distress of aircrew and engineers alike.
Military Airworthiness budgets were plundered by RAF VSOs in order to pay for spectacularly incompetent AMSO policies and was fatally damaged by their malevolent excesses. The MAA thus inherited a busted flush and no amount of mission statements or Golden Periods could revive this forever pining Norwegian Blue.
The essential ring fencing of Air Safety budgets was breached year after year. Skilled and knowledgeable engineers were replaced by untrained and inexperienced apparatchiks who knew only to tick the required boxes to ensure that Safety Cases were broken, one after the other. The resulting canker infected fleet after fleet. Yes, it was about money but only because that Air Safety ring fencing was deliberately torn asunder by RAF VSOs.
The result is as you describe, a bureaucracy kept busy achieving little or nothing. The long term effect will be to reduce this nation's Air Power such that our ability to prevail in a future Air War will be hugely compromised. Even Fat Hermann never achieved that. The cover up must end and those responsible brought to book!