You should be able to contribute to these software projects, and receive credit akin to publishing a new result. Authors and contributors (and bug-fixers) should receive more credit for the subsequent results derived from their software. This aligns incentives more properly: The researchers struggling to gain insight using tools can trust the tools, and they are incentivized to make their new tools useful to the community, rather than publish-and-forget.
If you are a scientist and a programmer, you could make a software useful for others, publish an article about it, and provide it cost-free under the condition that when people use it for research they have to cite the article in their paper. This is how you could get lots of citations.
Many of the best-used robotics packages are handled in this way. The ROS paper itself has thousands of citations.
But it might be tough to get tenure doing that, and few jobs will support those efforts outside robotics startups or research labs, and often proprietary is the law of the land in those domains.
And outside tech R and D, where software still rules but isn't a core competency, you'll likely never have success with this model, sadly
