That's certainly a driver for much of the pathology, however, I don't really see how that can be changed - I haven't seen any good proposals for what could reas

That's certainly a driver for much of the pathology, however, I don't really see how that can be changed - I haven't seen any good proposals for what could reasonably replace the current bibliographic metrics for the various funding bodies and institutions. They do need some 'outsourced' objective metric because they aren't capable or willing to do in-depth review of each individual's work, and they won't trust the self-evaluation of researchers or their home institutions.