Well... he'd still get published today just not in one of the
more prestigious journals. I tend to agree that more prestigious
journals _should_ favor large scale, hard-to-question studies
because they need to stay reliable. For even with all of my
issues about the things you can hide with big data and with
statistical trickery, nevertheless, it's generally good science.
Generally anyway. I'll still complain. But there's other
journals. Can't get into Nature? Find another journal. Someone
will take your article. Besides, you've always got arXiv and
others. Once published, market the hell out of it online and
write a book. That's the way things happen now. It's not perfect
but it's effective.
