If there's the suspiscion that NIST interests aren't aligned with the public ones (at least wrt cryprography, I hope they're at least honest with the physical constants), why do we still allow them do dictate the standards?

I mean, there's plenty of standards bodies and experts in the cryptography community around the world that could probably do a better job. At this point NIST should be treated as a compromised certificate authority: just ignore them and move along.