[derbOac]

The problem isn't the incremental nature of the papers or the collaboration, it's the equating of scientist quality with numbers of publications (or something like it).

By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.

I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.

If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.

[op00to]

The comment wasn’t that they had a lot of papers, but they had a lot of papers in influential conferences.