[epistasis]

You're absolutely right here. Many journals do #2, and I generally find these to be worthless. For example, the Author Summaries on PLoS articles in a field that I'm not familiar with almost never help me. Often times when I read a paper in detail and journal club it with others, the conclusions that we derive from the data presented in figures has quite different emphasis than what is emphasized in the paper itself.

Sometimes with hindsight one can go back to a paper and say "this is important because of X" but it can be really hard to do that at the beginning, and often times the true value of the data may be different than the hypothesis under which the data was originally generated.