Yes. It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research. I was fortunate enough to work

Yes. It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research. I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful. These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.