How about you do something constructive instead and propose a better alternative. You're just "poisoning the well" with empty accusations and ignoring how successful the scientific method has been.
The parent comment is not an empty accusation, but a truth known to everyone in academia. The publishers extort huge profit margins from libraries and universities without providing any useful service. See http://thecostofknowledge.com and the articles linked from it for more information.
That's not what the OP said though. I am in academia and most of my colleagues would agree with you about publishers. That's why most of us publish pre-prints on our websites, so that everyone can access our work. We can debate the business model but the OP is saying it produces inept research without really supporting that statement.
Nature is not the problem though, they just happen to be one of the most prominent and selective publishers - many/most? people hate them because they can't get in.
IMHO the entire process of scientific review is wrong. Once millions of dollars in research grants depend on a paper being "accepted", once getting a grant is a zero-sum game, the scientific review is irrevocably corrupted.
The main post is not about alternatives though - it is about a new thing that Nature is trying out. To which I posted that the whole thing is rotten from inside
I don't think this is the right avenue or thread to talk about alternatives.
If you want my opinion, it is the scientific publishing model the is broken, starting right with the structure of a scientific paper.
The way research papers are written dates back to a time where your only source of information was the printed paper.
Every single scientific publication today is overdone, exaggerated, overly verbose and almost impossible to comprehend. If you make a single, true and noteworthy observation that helps others, you cannot publish that alone. It has to be dressed up. You have to exaggerate, dress it up, bury it deep into "more" content to make it publication-worthy. The inablity to get credit for small but important research findings is the what, in my opinion is killing science from within. The big papers are a thing of a past, but scientists cannot let go, because that's what they were taught as being important.
