It's strange to me that the gate is based on success, and not just a panel of your peers/mentors judging the way you performed the study. After all, negative results are just as valuable as positive results, unless we decide we're going to ignore them and let someone else run the same experiment... which is what we're doing.

At least when considering someone for a PhD or Masters, you'd think the point would be to learn good practice, not to actually push the field forward. There's just not as much frontier as when the rules were set.