You're right, of course. I mostly complain because it feels cathartic to rant, but I am well aware that it's probably the same in the private sector, the govern

You're right, of course. I mostly complain because it feels cathartic to rant, but I am well aware that it's probably the same in the private sector, the government, etc. That's just human structures I guess. As for designing a better system that's more robust to these flaws, it is a hard problem. There are structural issues when trying to apply traditional scientific virtues to the real world (how do you reasonably ensure reproducibility with a ridiculously expensive experiment, or one spannig decades, or one involving cohorts of tens of thousands of people? How do you ensure peer review is honest and comprehensive when there are exactly three labs specialized in a subject, and they're all competitors? Or even collaborators?), even if you assumed that editorial bias (toward big names, against negative results, toward trendy subjects, etc.), dishonesty and nepotism didn't exist. Plus there's a wide system of power-wielding stakeholders with huge incentives to maintain the status quo: established big shots, publishers (cough cough Elsevier cough cough), and so on. So yeah, things are broken but we're all trudging along trying to enjoy what we do and make do with what we have. Who knows, things may even get fixed one day.