Research might be hard, harder than whatever else the rest of the world is doing, but the tenure system is not giving us the best researchers. It rewards those that are at the right place at the right time, it's mostly luck of the current spectacle, and then it sets those "accomplished" people up for failure as they eventually see their luck running out. They are very motivated to use less and less ethical tools for years to keep producing "results".
That doesn't make those few wrong. (Also the number of supporters seems to be growing. Piketty's book - Capital in the 21st century - had big waves, and it argues for a wealth tax, for example.)
Research quality went up in fields where the community (and/or the funding orgs) started demanding things like pre-registration, data availability, and so on.
