It's probably best to assume that since that funding was provided to be used with a specific focus, they didn't (and/or couldn't) use it for the Foundation's maintenance.
And Gnome Foundation handles non-development stuff, like hackathons, Guadec, community outreach, liaising with other projects/governments/companies, etc. not to mention boring legal stuff like copyright of their name and icons and all that jazz.
It's basically the non-development part of the project.
Wasting? Gnome is amazing. Money and time extremely well spent.
I get that some people hate that Gnome isn't another WinUX desktop, but they need to get over it. Either accept it and adapt to a more modern workflow, add an extension like Dash to Panel, or use one of the dozen other desktop environments, most of which are designed with a WinUX or something similar.
I also don't really see why you're putting quotes around vision lol. Every project has a vision.