So, now I'm confused about what you're actually saying. You start by acknowledging that the status quo in academic writing is a standard of bad, obfuscatory writing (and this goes back to what you said originally: "All the people I know in academia...complain about journal standards.")

But then you posit some kind of broad pool of outside-the-status-quo "good" journals, that hold different standards? I don't think this pool exists. If they did, the status quo would be different, and your friends would not have the uniform complaint that you report.

And being a reviewer isn't particularly high-status, because it's typically an anonymous job. In fact the really top-of-the-field academics usually don't do much reviewing, because they're too busy. The one exception is that journals will, as a courtesy, often give big-name academics the chance to review articles that attack or oppose their own work. (You can probably see why this is a bad idea, but it's very common--and results, as you might expect, in "unorthodox" papers being denied publication.)