i don't put them up on a pedestal but i greatly respect the risk they were willing to take. every signer of the declaration of independence had a bounty on their head, and many of them lost property and their wealth during the revolutionary war. those were big things to wager.
imagine today a group that is so fed up with the way gov't is being run - too many lobbyists giving out gobs of perks and money for votes, politicians who don't have to follow the same laws they hand down to us, lifelong politicians who no longer serve the public good outside of how it benefits them personally - that they decide to risk it all and not only declare war on the feds, but take up weapons and start an actual war. just imagine what they're risking by doing this. that's the same general scenario as the guys in the late 1700s, who then wrote a new completely new system of gov't, one that wasn't being used anywhere else and was often called the great experiment. it worked, and has worked pretty well for decades.
but we have now reached a point where corruption is done right in front of us and hardly anyone raises and eyebrow. we receive so many empty promises about "reaching across the aisle", knowing that none of those promises are going to kept on things that truly matter. the approval rating of congress has reached all time lows, and the president is seen by many as a distrustful leader. this is not the system the powdered wig guys left for us. it's been twisted and crushed and reshaped to something that no longer works in the best interests of the citizenry.
to characterize the work of the founding fathers as a simple money grab is pretty lame (although there's some truth to it, but you've completely dismissed the lack of a representative gov't).