This remark also astonishes my inner pedant:
"Committee members are mostly overworked academics who don't get any official credit for proposal writing."
There are obviously some very active members of these committees, who deserve credit and do a great job. However, one has to remember that the AOU checklist, its updates and the SACC website are probably THE most widely-cited publications in the whole of ornithology. And yet all of these groups include a large number of "hangers on", who barely ever write a proposal and (in the case of SACC) rarely seem to comment on other people's proposals more frequently than annually with more than a cursory comment, or who joined recently and so made almost no contribution to the list's development. These people free-ride the most cited publications in ornithology as coauthors. And yet we are to feel sorry for them not being credited.
Adding insult to injury, it is very frequent to see publications cite AOU committees as authority for new taxonomies, not the primary sources. AOU itself sometimes does not even refer to the primary sources on which its own decisions are based (cf. e.g. Schiffornis turdina). So not only do these poor neglected people, who deserve our greatest sympathy, freeride their way to citation nirvana, they often do so to the exclusion of those in the field and in the lab analysing actual situations.
It is very difficult to feel sorry for them not being credited for writing proposals! A bit of quid pro quo might not go amiss.