However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
The World
Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most.
At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.
Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.