I am indeed a huge proponent of the alternative routes method. My criticisms of higher education could go on for a long time, and I'm not even going to try and list them all here. My experience has also been that professors who also do research are not nearly as good teachers as the ones who don't. The best teachers I had were in community college, despite probably not being as "qualified" or well-versed in the subjects as the ones publishing papers, a good number of them actually cared about the students and went out of their way to help you get through the class. Counterintuitively, it seems the more prestigious the school the more self-centered and hostile the professors.

This is true. In research communities they actively tell graduate students not to care about teaching because it looks bad on a CV to have teaching awards, etc.