Bad time for me to decide to get a PhD!
The diagnosis is right but the treat is dead wrong. Instead of silly scoring systems, please improve recommender systems for papers. In this space, also opt-in and query-based personalization would be okay.
And please give me something like:
./query --topic "whatever I am interested at the moment" --OAonly --allPapersAsPDFs --download --maxRelated=10
Or:
./query --topic "whatever I am interested at the moment" --RSSfeed --maxEntriesPerDay=25 --withPersonalization
etc. In other words, most scientists are not particularly interested on navigating obscure and slow web platforms.
In a future where QED scores gain traction, every researcher will need a QED validator subscription to score their paper before publishing. Allowing researchers to tweak their papers for a higher score, potentially without substantial changes to their discovery.
Interesting but immoral customer acquisition tactic.
An LLM read a paper and concluded it was a top 1% paper.
Everyone involved were happy.