Confusion

I'm a smart girl. I have a college degree and a paralegal certificate so why is it so hard to figure out the way to start adopting a Waiting Child. I've read forum after forum, link after link on adoption in the US, specifically adoption of children currently in Foster Care (Waiting Children) but no one can seem to give me a straight answer about how to go about this.

You have to become a Foster Parent in order to Adopt. But when they start giving you the information about Foster Licensing they tell you the goal of Foster Parenting is reuniting the child with their birth parents... Huh? Didn't I call the adoption hot line? What if I just want to skip straight to the adopting part? I mean understand needing to go through the education part and getting the home checked out as suitable but why does all the information talk in circles.

Can the terms adoption/foster be used interchangeably. And if not why are the people needed to to do either of this type of parenting always lumped into the same descriptive paragraph. And why did the person from the agency tell me adopting a foster child was a long shot when I just read on the state website that 40% of kids in Foster Care never return to their birth parents and instead get placed for adoption.

And then I get a little skittish. Is this why you always hear about the system being broken? Could this be why these children have such a hard time finding permanent homes? Am I up for this? Are WE up for this? As this seems to be an idea placed safely in my heart I think the answer is yes but I guess a call to DCFS tomorrow is in order. Perhaps I really need to go through them instead of the Private Agency that we were referred to for licensing.