> A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics
It seems to me that given your 2 above statements you essentially want to abolish journals and peer review in order to be able to give researchers the ability to sponsor, parlay and generally use their social skills to push a paper out. You mention the internet so it's granted that as soon as somebody discovers that the more rabid followers one has, the better it is for the papers one is pushing...it becomes an arms race
All of the above is in order to essentially enable researchers to do what you accuse professors of doing (using politics to get ahead without or with little contribution).