There might be a path forward in the work on making computational work easily reproducible, by people like Konrad Hinsen, Yihui Xie, Jeremiah Orians, Eelco Dolstra, Ludovic Courtès, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Ricardo Wurmus, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, but clearly it hasn't been a panacea so far. Speedrunning results are in many cases reproducible by virtue of nailed-down console hardware and bit-identical game images, but that's harder to achieve even for FEM simulations of turbulent MHD systems, much less actual experimental MHD systems like a Farnsworth fusor.
How do people initially get up to speed on speedrunning? Are there tutorials, the equivalent of a textbook with problem sets, some other onramp? Can we gamify learning quantum mechanics? (I've tried QiskitBlocks but so far haven't been impressed.)
I can buy more people in physics working on more problems. There are a wealth of interesting problems in physics and more people all going in different directions would be great. But ten times as many people working on the LHC? A hundred times as many people working on string theory? I don't buy it.
To me, the ideal model of fully open, accessible research is the speedrunning community. I don't see speedrunning as all that different from experimental work. You probe, you hypothesize, you have breakthroughs, you compete in what's generally a pretty healthy way, and you communicate and document. Look at how this scales, how many people get in and get obsessed, etc. To really master quantum hall, you need to have have a devotion to the field that's comparable to "completing Super Mario 64 with half an A press."