For what it is worth, I get consulting business because my name is on RFCs. It is not a sufficient qualification of course but it one of the ways the search firms find me.
I don't think that we need to worry too much about the inanities of the academic publication game. Back in the 1980s the universities were the only places that had the computing power. That isn't a constraint any more and they don't pay a tenth of what consulting work pays.
That game is going to be very different in a decades time in any case. The Web is only just starting to nibble the edges of the academic publishing racket. It takes decades for major social changes to be felt but the transitions can be swift. The Web will do for that game what Amazon did for book of the month club and EBay for classified ads.