Not so bad vibes
Seems to me that we agree on the nature of the problem. Where we disagree is the cause of it and the way to improve it. Some of this is a matter of perspective:
It goes without saying that the rules inside a company are often a lot more stringent than one would tolerate in outside society. But, like joining the Army, one volunteers for this, and accepts a certain amount of loss of individuality*. Nobody forces you to work for a corporation, and there are a lot of other options
So much of the employment market today is controlled by corporations (using "corporations" to signify "big companies" in general) that I have to disagree with you about the degree of choice. The big companies have laid off millions of people, and they can't find replacement work. Small business isn't taking up the slack. It's pretty evident from the facts that the corps have, if not quite a monopoly, yet, on employment, a cartel-like lock on much of it. As they go, so do we all. Even the freelancers depend on corporate contracts, so we're not actually as independent as we like to think.
3M is an exceptional company, by all accounts. I'd say that their decentralized structure accounts for their ability to innovate, and the exception supports the "rule" that most big corporations with their centralized command-and-control systems have all the negatives of similarly organized politico-economic systems. 3M's like a federation of semi-autonomous states.
I still believe that space will be opened up not by NASA or Lockheed, but by some smaller outfit.
I've been reading a chapter at a time of the CAIB report, and last night I came across something that should give you hope. I didn't bookmark the passage, unfortunately, but I think it was Part 2/Chapter 5, which examines some history and the NASA culture, and observes that NASA is good at exploration but lousy at routine operations. They didn't make an explicit recommendation about privatization, but the report creates a context in which policy-makers should look at it more favorably. Dividing the labor so that NASA has a reinvigorated exploration mission would be a win all around. You don't need the Right Stuff to operate a space trucking company, you just have to schlep the cargo...."when it absolutely, positively, has to get there".