I had a similar problem with hiring product designers. How do you get & measure great design? What I ultimately decided was, the only way to get great design,

I had a similar problem with hiring product designers. How do you get & measure great design? What I ultimately decided was, the only way to get great design, is by hiring great designers, and only other great designers recognize who's very promising vs. who's not, with some degree of success. Research is the same. However, due to the inherent entanglement of historical biases with merit, it became very fraught in the U.S. to rely on expert judgment to pick new professors, every school clamoring to find some objective metrics to avoid charges of discrimination. This is coupled with the fact that most departments are filled with mediocre people who are not particularly qualified to pick promising young scientists to begin with. So ironically, discrimination is still there & at times worse, but now there is metricized cover for this bias. "We found that tall white dude X has more publications than Y". Meanwhile, academia right now is almost irrevocably filled with pedantic scientists, drip-feeding papers with maximal verbiage at a steady pace.