I agree that the multi-year publication timelines for journals are in general silly. I agree that keeping up with a field by reading journals doesn't work. If b

I agree that the multi-year publication timelines for journals are in general silly. I agree that keeping up with a field by reading journals doesn't work. If by editorial review you mean "the editor alone decides", I don't think that's a good replacement. I think the computer science publication model of a few conferences per year with ~3 month submit-to-decision timelines, based on 3-5 reviews per paper, is pretty good. But it's probably not appropriate for fields with deep contributions that take substantial time to verify, like math.