The field is pressured to adopt and enforce standards when practitioners speak out and get noticed by the establishment. Much of getting noticed, for better or worse, involves getting published in a traditional journal.
As opposed to actually doing science. This is the root of the problem. By the time I finished grad school I had been cited over 5000 times; that didn't make me a better scientist. Actually implementing clinical trials and supervising junior researchers, that did. (Oddly, so did reviewing others' work)
Traditional journals are an artifact of the past. They interfere with the proper assignment of priority for discovery and their opaque review processes give some truly terrible work the stamp of "peer review". I submit some work to them, as requested by my colleagues, but if it were all my decision I'd never again send a paper to a journal that doesn't allow preprints (or considers it "prior publication") because that process is truly ass backwards.
Fortunately NIH and NSF have started to notice the same. It's only a matter of time now.
