I think that you generalize a little bit. Most scientists are not as bad as one may think of after reading your post.

Science is in constant evolution. That is what is called the scientific method. What is thought to be correct today may become incorrect or just a bad approximation tomorrow. The idea is to try to learn to understand the world better. And a good scientist is always asking questions...

I now take my field as a good counterexample. Even if it is true you can be published very easily (there are publishers proposing to publish any article ask for a few hundreds of dollars), established researchers don't pay attention to those. They are just meaningless. Only well recognized journals matter and being published in those is not as easy.