I largely agree with your complaint but I don't think the causation is quite that simple. "Bean counters" didn't show up to a highly competitive field and decid

I largely agree with your complaint but I don't think the causation is quite that simple. "Bean counters" didn't show up to a highly competitive field and decide to redefine the competition. It used to be relatively easy to get a faculty position, and there used to be a relatively small number of people/papers to keep up with. As academic science grew, both in the complexity of open questions and the size of the aspiring faculty population, there was going to necessarily be some changes to academic output and its evaluation. Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.