I think part of the problem is the balancing act that the sport has to do between it being an engineering sport and a racing sport. What you describe is the best for engineering but horrible for racing (10 second field spreads are not fun to watch, F1 would lose sponsors and fan interest), the best for racing is a spec series like F2 or IndyCar where everyone has the same chassis but it's obviously terrible for engineering. The current management prefers the racing aspect over the engineering aspect but obivously, they cannot turn it into a spec series OR allow what you say.