I have no doubt SR athletes, like everyone else, plans their season with an eye to running as fast as possible. But I also think that they, like everyone else, plan to apply for government funding at the end of the season. Their history of doing just that would seem to bear me out on this. The only question is why, unlike others, they don't always appear concerned about putting themselves in the best position to get said funding. And, as was pointed out above, you really can't expect to get AO funding based simply on performance.
To nail down AO funding, Ross would only have to have run the AO 5,000m (which he could have basically jogged and still got sufficient points). And he was at the meet anyway.
He got AC carding, so his season was clearly sufficient for that.
He qualified for and ran FISU, but not after having tried to bend the rules and get himself named ot the Pan Ams team instead (you had to declare for one or the other early in the season). He was actually named to Pan Am team, then quickly removed when people complained. The official explanation for his having been named was that a mistake was made. But, his own coach was on the committee that named him, and would presumably have been aware that he had already declared for FISU. Ross later offered in an interview that he thought the rules preventing him from switching to Pan Ams were "petty", or something to that effect. Once again, the fact that others had had to adhere to them-- and that giving everyone else the same special after-the-fact consideration that he (almost) received would have led to chaos-- seems to have eluded him.
It would be very hard to avoid concluding that SR has a habit of believing that their success sometimes entitles them to exceptions to established rules and procedures, and of regarding complaints about this from others as a kind of "revenge of the losers".
As a long time observer of Canadian athletics, I've seen this attitude in a few places before, most notoriously in the Mazda Optimist (Ben Johnson) group in the 1980s (in which I had a very close friend). Members of this group had been thoroughly inculcated in the belief that they were already better than everyone else in Canada, and that anything they did to achieve the next level in the sport (up to and including systematic doping) was completely justified. And they were openly contemptuous of anyone who called them out on their attitude or behaviour. Their understanding was that the rest of us were just jealous, no-talent chumps not willing to do everything it took to succeed.
In the case of SR, the behaviour is clearly not on the same level, but the attitude bears a striking similarity, when push comes to shove.