Idiotic or Brilliant?

Watching coverage of the horrendous and continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico I'm troubled by the idea of spreading dispersing agents over the oil. Yes, it breaks the oil into smaller blobs, but it doesn't remove it. It's going to wind up more widely spread this way, isn't it. Dispersing it just seems like a cosmetic fix to me. Wouldn't it be easier to scoop up the blobs if they were bigger and more solid? Isn't there some way to coagulate or congeal the gunk into scoopable chunks? Someone with knowledge of these things, please set me straight.