I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.
No. Tax deduction effectively excludes middlemen if they don't exclusively distribute to tax-deductible purposes. And at least in Germany, the hurdle is high, as is the risk of being retroactively declared non-deductible, after which you need to pay all the retroactive taxes, usually bankrupting your org and even the middle-men.
