Reminds me of the old saying 'the purpose of a system is what it does'. Academia has been this way for a long time, and many have written about these problems for just as long, and yet here we are still with the same system that incentivizes fraud (whether that is made-up data, self-planarization to up the publication metrics, or both).

It makes me wonder which group would lose out if this system was somehow fixed. Is it just that managers and grant authorities would have to work a whole lot harder to evaluate a researchers merit? Is that all that's holding us to the current system?