That's an oversimplification at best. Right now, NSF grant funding rates are so low that scientists feel they need to submit 6 good grants to get one funded, so

That's an oversimplification at best. Right now, NSF grant funding rates are so low that scientists feel they need to submit 6 good grants to get one funded, so they are forced to spend most of their time allocated to research writing grants. But if this environment went away, most of these people would love nothing more than to do the actual science. I think a couple of bigger issues are (i) we reward the first person/group to reach a conclusion, so there's incentive to be sloppy and get your name on the research first and sort out the (hopefully minor) problems later and (ii) there's an expectation from the general public that scientists have to be "productive" all the time. Productive is of course defined as producing new and exciting results, rather than carefully verifying old results, or trying to fill the gaps in previous work. See how much pressure there is on scientists to do "transformative" rather than "incremental" research. I don't think we as a society have a solution to these problems even outside of science. To pick a familiar example for HN, programmers who write overly-complicated messy code are often rewarded over those who write simpler, cleaner and well-architected code because the former looks like more work. Similarly, there's little interest in writing test benches or documentation in open source projects, because there's little reward or incentive for these things. OpenSSL pre-heartbleed era is a perfect example of all the wrong incentive systems working together to produce a steaming pile of bullshit that everyone involved in the field kept claiming as being the most secure solution out there.