Those are roughly my thoughts as well, although I'm afraid that I only believe this to rationalize my decision to go into academia. While the argument makes sense, there are definitely professors that express frustration with their position.
What does seem like pretty sound logic is that if you could get better results without a research group, you wouldn't form a research group. So you probably won't run into the problem of achieving suboptimal results from administrative overhead (you could always just hire less people), but you might run into the problem of doing work that is less fun than it could be.
Another point is that plausibly some other profession (corporate work?) would have less administrative overhead per unit of efficiency, but I don't actually believe this to be true.
Ideally, I'd like to save the world. One way to do that involves contributing academic research, which raises the question of what's the most effective way of doing that.
The traditional wisdom says if you want to do research, you should get a job in a university. But for the most part the system seems to be set up so that you first spend a long time working for someone else and research their ideas, after which you can lead your own group, but then most of your time will be spent on applying for grants and other administrative trivia rather than actually researching the interesting stuff. Also, in Finland at least, all professors need to also spend time doing teaching, so that's another time sink.
I suspect I would have more time to actually dedicate on research, and I could get doing it quicker, if I took a part-time job and did the research in my spare time. E.g. the recommended rates for a freelance journalist in Finland would allow me to spend a week each month doing work and three weeks doing research, of course assuming that I can pull off the freelance journalism part.
What (dis)advantages does this have compared to the traditional model?
Some advantages:
Some disadvantages:
EDIT: Note that while I certainly do appreciate comments specific to my situation, I posted this over at LW and not Discussion because I was hoping the discussion would also be useful for others who might be considering an academic path. So feel free to also provide commentary that's US-specific, say.