It varies field-by-field. In my field, peer review is a joke. I'm glad it's not a joke in your field yet, but incentive structures say it eventually will be. If incentives don't change, it's a question of when, not if.
High-quality academic curation doesn't effect anything in your career. On the other hand, the impact of your own research does does affect it. I'd like my taxpayer dollars to go a little less towards publish-or-perish, and a little more towards QA to make sure the papers coming out are credible.