Thanks for listing these examples! They indeed seem to provide counterexamples to the trend of increasing bureaucratization and credentialism, though I must note that they are all several decades old.

However, more importantly, my main point is that bureaucratization tends to have the same negative effect on science as on any other field of human endeavor. The number one tendency in every bureaucracy is that things should be done in such a way that everyone can cover his ass and avoid any personal responsibility no matter what happens. In contrast, productive work always requires personal responsibility: someone must accept the blame if things go wrong, or otherwise there is no incentive to do things right, unless people are driven by sheer personal enthusiasm.

When Max Planck decided to promote Einstein's work, he was putting his own reputation on the line: his career and prestige would have suffered greatly if it had turned out that he was swindled by a crackpot. But the modern peer-review system absolves everyone of responsibility -- everyone involved has his little piece of bureaucratic duty, and no matter what happens, there is no personal responsibility at all.

Some supposedly "scientific" features of the present system are in fact the height of ass-covering perversity, like for example the "double-blind" peer-review -- how on Earth can you be an expert capable of reviewing a novel research paper, but unable to figure out who the authors are from the content of the paper? Even with a simple "blind" peer review, it's a complete farce, considering how small and tightly-knit any bleeding-edge research community necessarily is: either your paper will be given for review to clueless incompetent outsiders, or you can guess pretty reliably who the "anonymous" insider reviewers are. (And in any case, you know who is on the editorial board, and what nepotistic considerations are driving them!)

So, at the end of the day, I don't see any advantage that the present heavily bureaucratized system might have over the old system that was based on honor and reputation. In my view, the present system functions well only insofar as in many fields, the top people are still driven by enthusiasm and sense of honor and doing their best to keep their field sound. But this is despite the bureaucratizing tendencies, not thanks to them. In fields where the personal enthusiasm of prominent insiders hasn't been strong enough to keep bureaucratically backed pseudoscience at bay, the mainstream work has long since degenerated into sheer nonsense.