[mannykannot]

This article shows very clearly why that does not work. The Princeton team could not reproduce the Berkeley results, yet the inaccessibility of the code meant that the latter persisted as a road-block for almost a decade.

Imagine if this reproducibility excuse were applied to experimental results and technique: we don't have be careful or explain in detail what we are doing, as reproducibility will take care of any errors. One consequence would be that, as the current state of knowledge became less certain, it would become less clear what to do next.