The question of whether or not the alternatives mentioned are preferable is basically irrelevant; the point of the article is that the alternatives are essentially unachievable regardless of whether or not they're optimal because they lack the qualities necessary to dominate.

Which objection rather adresses the entire rest of your post. But I'd still like to point out a couple of things:

• I wasn't referring to journals with "low quality control"; I was referring to journals which refused to publish replications. This point was a reference to lukeprog's recent article as well as CarlShulman's article, both of which address publication bias and the widespread policy of failing to publish replications.
• The gender ratio problem is probably the single most famous example in all of evolutionary game theory, which is why I chose it. It's broadly accepted within biology that a ratio fairly heavily favoring females (although perhaps not 5:1) would work better for the species as a whole, and for a long time one of the biggest questions in biology was why it's so universally approximately 1:1. Darwin himself specifically mentions this as a potential problem with the theory of natural selection.

If these points were unclear in the original article, I might go back and edit them in.