The broken aspects of academia are, it seems to me, an unavoidable consequence of needing a scalable system to determine who is doing well and who isn't, so you can give them money. I don't see how to dream up a system that gives you all the good of academia with none of the annoyances.

Think how hard the hiring problem is. How do you hire the best people? How do you assess someone's quality based on a few bits of paper and a short interview. Allocating funding in academia consists of solving problems like that, all the time.