Moving Family History Work Forward

Extracting all the names from a census into a computer database involves thousands of human hours to verify each name found by OCR (character recognition) engines. The Generations Network has invested those hours to load not one but hundreds of censuses on the Internet. I was surprised to recently find out that there are programs in the Church that are duplicating this work. From an observer's standpoint, I wonder why Family Search should invest so many volunteer hours to do work that has already been done. It would seem that with cooperation instead of competition, those volunteer hours could be put to better use on other work that has not been finished.