No, in my opinion the problem is that all the low hanging fruits in science have been collected and our old way of doing science does not work anymore. 20 or 30 years ago it was "easy" for a single PhD student to discover something completely new and groundbreaking. Of course it still happens today, but 20-30 years ago it was way easier to get truly new results as a small group of researcher with a low budget.
In the very beginning of science you did not even need anything. Just looking art the stars and thinking about it was enough.
But nowadays? We have to build a LHC with several 1000 people to do basic science! As a PhD student you have to spend 3 years just reading and learning "old science" in order to reach the current boundaries of scientific area.
The current system of "we give this topic to a PhD student and he will figure out a solution in exactly 3 years" just does not work anymore. In order to advance science we need much larger and much more connected groups who grind away on a single problem together for 5-10 years to make truly groundbraking scientific advancements.
I wonder to what extent crowd work can be effective for making real progress; I've been impressed by things like FoldIt and astronomical classifiers (as opposed to the BOINC distributed processing approach) but I don't know to what extent those result in real progress vs useful-but-limited stamp collection. I am very interested in the possibilities for gamification but it seems like there's a big gap between the empirical data collection/space mapping aspect and actual theoretical development of the kind done at the Santa Fe institute or the IAS.
One possible way out of this (which may have been tried and rejected already for all I know) could be to take up the approach of legal journals, which are usually edited by students rather than professors. There are downsides to this as well - a fetishization of formatting and a busywork demand for citations on even the most prosaic claims, not to mention a tendency to proliferation, but there's an endless supply of eager reviewers who are highly motivated to do good work to burnish their academic and subsequent practice credentials. Being an editor of the Harvard Law Review can get you into all sorts of high-powered jobs, for example - though so, depressingly, can putting your name on a ghost-writer's monument to your commercial vanity, so that shouldn't be the only reason to do it :-/
I agree with the necessity for automation, and maybe some sort of tokenization so that people can save time by being able to rely on trusted certifications. Remember when Creative Commons seemed like an idea whose time had come and a lot of art work was appearing with standardized icons that quickly summarized the scope of the legal rights being asserted over the work's copyright? After a great start that model seems to have run out of steam, perhaps because copyright as a political has been sidelined by more fundamental concerns - at any rate, I had anticipated seeing the CC 'branding' much more widely by now than I do. But similar shorthand cor certifications of statistical rigor or procedural validity might help to make scientific publications more reliable, as well as accessible to lay readers.