"there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves."

They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end?

The taxpayer's representatives couldn't spend two days thinking through where and how they are going to store and sort data coming out of the research they are funding. Well, someone did it for them (not even particularly well) and is now laughing on the way to the bank. Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair.

None of these journals even bother storing the actual data that came out of the research, so that you could check it statistically.