in my experience, the best papers are written by people who are not part of the academic incentive system.
We had a problem at UC Berkeley where a very smart CS guy wanted to publish a paper but since he didn't have an official affiliation, major journals wouldn't publish his papers (they literally wouldn't publish a paper by a person whose correspondence address was their home address).
So we gave him a title at Berkeley and the paper was published.
His work is some of the best around, but the academic community wouldn't pay attention until he ran some benchmarks and had them disseminated by prominent academics.
We had a problem at UC Berkeley where a very smart CS guy wanted to publish a paper but since he didn't have an official affiliation, major journals wouldn't publish his papers (they literally wouldn't publish a paper by a person whose correspondence address was their home address).
So we gave him a title at Berkeley and the paper was published.
His work is some of the best around, but the academic community wouldn't pay attention until he ran some benchmarks and had them disseminated by prominent academics.