Sure, your point that a Ph.D. program
can be a political mud hole is correct.

For your

> get into a research program that fits one's skills that is the toughest part.

I didn't bother with that and, instead,
picked my own problem, did my own
research, and submitted my results.
My professors had very little idea
what I was doing until I was done
and submitted my work. Net, my
"research program" was mine. Maybe
in some fields, e.g., cell biology,
can't do what I did and your description
is correct.

But if pick a good school, then what
I said is simple but correct. E.g.,
Johns Hopkins, where I got my Ph.D.,
then, and maybe still, has no official
coursework requirement for a Ph.D. The
official requirement for a dissertation
was, and maybe still is,
"an original contribution to knowledge
worthy of publication". If there is
any doubt, then the student can just
submit the work for publication.

In my case, I took a problem I noticed
in a course, did a pass by the library
to confirm that there was no solution
in the literature,
worked up a rough solution, asked for
a 'reading course' to attack the problem,
got the course approved, and right away
showed my rough solution. Two weeks
later I had a nice, clean, solid solution.
I walked my original work around campus
to some world famous guys, and they
saw my work as new. So my work
was clearly publishable.
So, in two weeks I'd met the official
requirement for a dissertation. My
work was not trivial: I found a
new result comparable with the classic
Whitney extension theorem and applied
my result to solve the problem I'd
started with but noticed that my work
also solved a problem stated but not
solved in a famous paper by Arrow,
Hurwicz, and Uzawa. Poor Uzawa may
still have not gotten his Nobel prize!

I didn't try to use that work as my
dissertation, but the reading course
credit filled out what I needed for
a Master's. Also my research in that
reading course put a halo on my
head so that a Ph.D. was much more
likely. Let me emphasize again, the
key is in one word, research.

For my dissertation, I
took a problem I'd brought to graduate
school, done the research on it
independently in my first summer,
got the work approved as my dissertation,
wrote and ran some illustrative software,
wrote up my work,
stood for an oral exam, and got my
Ph.D. For the work of the reading
course, I published that later
in a good journal.

In most good research universities,
a student who passes the qualifying
exams and has some good, publishable
work will have to do something really
strange not to get a Ph.D.

Some good research can make the
political mud wrestling
disappear quickly.

The main reason for ABD is the challenge
of doing some research that is publishable,
"new, correct, and significant". If there
is any doubt about the quality of the work,
then just publish it.

The definition of a good algorithm is
from J. Edmonds. He was a graduate student
at U. Maryland, told the faculty to stuff it,
went to NBS, did some research on graph theory,
published it, and got a visit from U. Maryland
saying that if he would take copies of his
papers, put them in a stack, put a staple in a corner,
and submit that as his dissertation, then he'd
get his Ph.D. Again, the point is the research.
The mud wrestling is nonsense easily wiped away
by some good research.