These journals like to say they need the exclusivity, prestige and money to support their editorial process. Yet, given the exclusivity, money and prestige, they apparently don't do a great job.
On the other hand, is there a clear alternative? Is there a way to organize the review process such that the power of the editor is reduced, yet the quality is maintained? I'm not sure.
It seems like this would require non-anonymous open review and a some kind of rating/comment system for papers. It's possible that what ends up happening is that it creates more work for the reader in the same way that it takes effort to tease out a products true worth on Amazon. That might not be a bad thing at all.
The alternative is open post-publication peer review: any scientist that reads a paper in her/his field of expertise may act as a reviewer and publish a rating or review of that paper.
The end result does not create more work for the reader, as something like the average of ratings received by a paper gives in many cases more information than just the name of the journal where it has been published. For example, this Nature paper currently has a rating of 2% on Epistemio, although it has been published in the prestigious Nature: http://www.epistemio.com/p/Jr3gS9VW .
The journal name is a too weak information as compared to individual ratings of papers, as the distribution of the quality of papers from a given journal is very skewed.
The literature is dauntingly massive, and there is clearly a demand from scientists for an instant method of identifying excellent and important work. Currently, journal name fills this role (however imperfectly).
Anonymous review exists for a reason and doesn't seem to have much to do with the first issue you raise: the owners of top journals collect large economic and intellectual rents from their monopoly ownership of the top journal name. I actually don't think the anonymity of the review has much to do with the issue raised by the OP, and I'd suggest putting it aside.
So you want some sort of rating system for papers. In the long term, this is usually citation count, but in the short term it probably has to be judged by a trusted human being. Right now, the journal editors fill this role not so much because they are particularly smart, but because their monopoly on the name ensures that all the best work will be sent to them.
Note, however, that just asking the smart scientists what they're reading is not enough. Reviewing articles, and coordinating multiple reviews, is hard work. Right now, the editors get compensated in cash (derived mostly on their name monopoly) and the scientists get compensated with the warm fuzzy idea that they helped the community, and maybe with some back scratching on their own paper from the editor in the future.
A potential solution needs to figure out which humans are going to be assessing papers for extremely important (which needn't be the same thing as the peer review), how they will be compensated, where the money will come from if they are compensated in cash, how to deal with the perverse effects of cash incentives, and how to prevent any small group of humans from controlling the process. This is not an easy problem.
On the other hand, is there a clear alternative? Is there a way to organize the review process such that the power of the editor is reduced, yet the quality is maintained? I'm not sure.
It seems like this would require non-anonymous open review and a some kind of rating/comment system for papers. It's possible that what ends up happening is that it creates more work for the reader in the same way that it takes effort to tease out a products true worth on Amazon. That might not be a bad thing at all.