No the problem is that there's no incentive to do your job between the PhD and permanent position phase. There's no reward for doing anything except publishing

No the problem is that there's no incentive to do your job between the PhD and permanent position phase. There's no reward for doing anything except publishing an amazing, mind shattering paper that will get a billion citations yesterday. Because unless you do that, everything else seems to be distributed randomly. So people cheat because the system is inherently unfair.