Upvoted for clearly pointing out the tradeoff (yes publicly visible accomplishments that are easy to recognize as accomplishments may not be the most useful thing to work on, but not looking awesome is a price paid for that and needs to be taken into account in deciding what's useful). However, I want to point out that if I heard that an important paper was written by someone who was paid $100 and doesn't appear on the author list, my crackpot/fraud meter (as related to the people on the author list) would go ping-Ping-PING, whether that's fair or not. This makes me worry that there's still a real danger of SIAI sending the wrong signals to people in academia (for similar but different reasons than in the OP).