Mathiness is something that can usually be detected by reverse engineering the work and seeing if a derivation was important. Unfortunately, I learned this in my own discipline (statistics) by comparing how implementations actually functioned to how they were originally derived and presented. My own dissertation contained a rather terrifying bit of analytic derivation that, upon finding suitably large samples, yielded to an approximation that was many orders of magnitude faster. But hey, my committee loved that gamma.
The issue of reviewer scarcity is of a piece with all serious research. If it was easy, somebody would have solved it already. Post-publication review is the only sustainable model, and it's more beneficial for the reader if they go in with a skeptical mindset anyhow. Journals and conferences simply cannot serve as more than the weakest of filters.