The FAA has good people in a lot of places, but the structure of the FAA needs a review and rethink of what it is there for, and what structure works for meeting its objectives. It has gone from a competent administration that balanced promotion and regulation to being an enforcement tool, and then finds itself interfered with by the politicians. It has had better days.
I've touched on this before in other threads, but the FAA has experienced it's own "brain drain" problem. I was a DER/AR for over 25 years before I retired. Must of the FAA people I dealt with were in the same age group as me - and now many if not most of them have also retired. Further, for a long time, many of the people at the Seattle FAA office were ex-Boeing (often disgruntled ex-Boeing but that's another story). They had real world experience working with aircraft systems, and it showed. The last few years before I retired, the new youngsters coming it simply had no real world experience - fresh faced kids right out of college with minimal mentor support from those with decades of experience. They were into box-checking without really comprehending what the meaning of those boxes was. Submit such and such document, check the box. They lacked the deeper understanding what checking those boxes meant - and hence lacked the judgement to determine if something was really safe regardless of if they could check their box.
I found it extremely frustrating trying to deal with them - submittals would get rejected for ridiculous reasons (seriously - I had a submittal rejected because my 8110 form listed one of the effected models as the 747-SP, when the TCDS says 747SP), and I frequently had to explain very basic aspects of the submittals that anyone familiar with commercial aircraft should know (again, seriously - I had to explain "EGT").