Actually I think farming out replication to undergrads would be an excellent approach. Your final year undergrad project should be to choose an under-replicated study and repeat it, publishing your findings. Each individual study might be less reliable if done by an undergrad than done by a seasoned researcher, but if each study is repeated by say 5 undergrads and 2+ of them fail to replicate the results, that would be enough to indicate that the study warrants further attention.

> One student could spend their time working on a important result gaining tons of insight and expertise while another could be stuck replicating a task that turned out to be worthless bullshit and have very little to show for it.

The whole point of science is that we don't know what will turn out to be an important result and what will turn out to be worthless bullshit. No study is worth a damn unless it's been replicated but everyone is too busy trying to land-grab the next little piece of unexplored territory to actually validate anything that comes before.

If nothing else, we need to regain the perception that a negative result is just as important as a positive result - to paraphrase Edison, discovering 100 things that don't work is just as important as discovering one thing that does.