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He's a neolib thru and thru, he wants to win as cheaply as possible without pissing off the US

I mean, this isn't necessarily neoliberalism, it's perfectly in line with Soviet doctrine, which Russia is obviously an inheritor of. In at attritional conflict, not unnecessarily expending men and resources is kind of a core concept.

People pointed out the whole "it's dragged on for longer than the Eastern Front in WW2" thing some weeks ago, but that was a fundamentally different situation - in the 1st phase, the Soviets were in a rush to liberate their territories on account of them fighting an openly genocidal foe, so every moment spent under occupation more death and suffering being inflicted upon their population. Here, Russia did actually take a lot of the separatist territories quickly at the opening of the war, and while still some Russian-speaking populations remained, it wasn't necessarily strategically tenable to go further (which happened back in WW2 as well, like with the Soviets not rushing in to aid the Warsaw Uprising, something Poles are still mad about and try to paint as some deliberate Soviet conspiracy to let the them get killed off rather than the simple strategic reality that Soviet troops couldn't have really sustained an offensive into Warsaw), and, as infested with neo-nazis as Ukraine may be, they're still not carrying out brutality anywhere near the scale of the Nazis in WW2. In the 2nd phase in WW2, even after pre-war Soviet territories were liberated, the rush continued for different reasons, now to determine the split of spheres of influence in post-war Europe, which obviously isn't applicable to a Ukraine that's not simultaneously being invaded from the other direction by another party (and with Russia not really having an interest in occupying any Ukrainian territories outside of the separatist oblasts).

Soviet planning in the Cold War also placed an emphasis on speed, because the specifics of that situation also facilitated it - the US obviously didn't have its entirely army deployed in Europe, so it would need to send reinforcements by sea, which would take time, so it was in the Soviets' interest to seize as much continental territory as possible before the US was able to bring their full might to bear there. And in the event of a quick victory not panning out, the Soviets were well prepared to switch to a more long-term attritional mode of war. So, absent extenuating factors forcing a rush, Soviet doctrine is perfectly fine with slowly grinding the enemy to dust over the course of several years.

In Ukraine's case, the Russian objective, as openly stated seventy million times (and ignored, because Westerners, with their brains broken by decades of wars launched on false pretenses, can't grasp the idea of a country actually just openly declaring what they're doing and why, there obviously must be a scheme behind it), is the demilitarization of Ukraine - and if that end cannot be achieved politically, through some kind of treaty... well, you know what Clausewitz says. The only thing that's left it to simply destroy enough military equipment and kill enough Ukrainian soldiers that the Ukrainian military simply ceases to be an effective fighting force. That is not something achievable quickly - I've spoken about this before, but a useful framework here is to compare WW2 with the US invasion of Iraq. The aftermath of WW2 did not see some great insurgency fought by the Nazis, despite them obviously having a lot of fanatical guys - why? Well, because all of those guys were either dead, injured, or captured - a long, brutal, attritional war had actually destroyed the German military (and a bunch of those captured guys would, later, after being freed, form the nucleus of the new Bundeswehr - if WW2 had been even more brutal, with the Nazis on the Western Front fighting more like they did on the Eastern one, a lot more often to the death rather than surrendering, and without Dönitz giving up, aside from the territorial split of Germany ending up rather different, the militaries of the post-war Germanies might not have had all that many men left to actually serve in them in the early years - see this graphic by the Federal Statistical Office and imagine an even bigger demographic hole). In Iraq conversely, the lightning-fast war fought by the Coalition, while it did destroy a lot of equipment, didn't kill all that many actual Iraqi soldiers - and with the post-war management of the occupation being completely bungled, there were now a whole bunch of pissed off former army men, who also got their hands on a ton of weaponry and explosives because the invasion was so lightning fast that Coalition forces kind of forgot to secure various military bases and storages and simply let the population pilfer them.

A fast Russian victory in Ukraine throws them into their own Iraq counter-insurgency scenario. The war is instead on the trajectory towards the WW2 outcome - of, by the end, a substantial proportion of Ukrainian soldiers being either dead, crippled, or imprisoned, but this time without there being a Western Allies equivalent here to "save" part of the Ukrainian army by capturing them and unleashing them on the Russians later (if anything, the surviving Ukrainian Nazis might well end up causing more trouble for the West). And with demographic trends across the world being what they are, an Ukrainian recovery anywhere in the near future isn't happening, and the possibility of Ukraine posing a future strategic threat is lessened.

Certainly, the Russians would have liked to do this one quickly - that's why they've been constantly banging the drum of negotiations (and, if they do win via the military option, having a failed state Ukraine next to them with most of its remaining male population being traumatized and likely otherwise disabled war veterans isn't exactly optimal). But, with Ukrainians approaching negotiations deeply unseriously, and the West continuing to whine about how unreasonable Russian demands are, that fell away as an option.

so instead of billions poured into R&D to overcome Ukrainian/US drone and electronic warfare

This is tech-brain-poisoned thinking, assuming that if you just pour enough money in there is some magical technology waiting to be uncovered which will solve your problems. Ukraine doesn't have some magical technological advantage in drones - rather, they've openly shown that they use civilian apartments as workshops for drone production. The "innovation" that Russians would need to implement would be to raze every apartment block in the country. Larger-scale industrial production (the one that can't be hidden away in civilian homes) in Ukraine has indeed been heavily damaged - but with military aid, the actual industry producing most of Ukraine's stuff isn't in Ukraine. There is no technological solution to this problem either - the "innovation" is to start WW3 and bomb every Western country's industrial centers. The actual major technological advantage Ukrainians have is access to Western ISR - and again, there is no magical solution here, some perfect jammer that can be developed to nullify that - the "innovation" is to start shooting Western satellites out of the sky, and that just brings us back to the "start WW3" scenario.

The main thing that Russia could perhaps be doing more of is fighting a hybrid war of its own, using secret means and proxies against the West - and while Western propaganda outlets say that this is totally happening, we can't actually know for sure the scale of it. All those factory accidents that have been happening all over the West - could they have actually been done by Russian intelligence? Maybe. Or maybe it's just that trying to suddenly scale up production leads to workers doing double shifts and making more mistakes due to fatigue, with some of those mistakes blowing their factories up. It happens

idiosyncratic advances based on whatever insight an individual Russian division happened to stumble upon

Advances happen precisely because of the "pounding artillery duels and building attritional losses"! It is the attrition which has left Ukrainian forces spread thin, with positions manned by literally a handful of guys, that allow Russian soldiers to occasionally make large advances after they poke an Ukrainian position and it reenacts this gif from the Simpsons