The comparison to "biota" as an alternative label is sharp, because it exposes the specific kind of conceptual slippage that biodiversity enables. Convention terms often succeed precisely because they defer rather than resolve disagreements, but biodiversity goes further by pretending to be a measurable quantity when it's really just a coordination device. I've been in meetings where people argue about whether a project "maintains biodiversity" without ever clarifying which surrogate they mean, and everyones talking past each other but nobody stops becuase stopping would reveal there's no shared object. The institutional feedback loop you describe is particularly damning, how funding structures entrench conceptual looseness.