A major problem must be the "who gets the credit thing", or?

I think the credit goes to the project, and the project lists its contributors. It seems like this is done mostly (or completely) for free, like open source software, which necessitates some other source of funding (like what happens with open source software). People in the project are fairly good at figuring out how various people helped (as is the case in open source), but the further you are from the details the blurrier it gets, and most people probably overestimate their contribution by a significant amount.

If what I am sketching concerning what you term "super-scientists and journyemen" could "evolve organically" from blog/public fora systems I'd be happy.

Well, one recent example of this here might be RobbBB's Building Phenomenological Bridges, specifically this comment.