The unspoken aspect of the pyramid scheme theory is that academia is great for the top one percent of Einsteins, and bearable for the top one percent of the most tenacious.
I'm interested to see what the future of the Research Scientist role is. It's basically a place for people who didn't do a post-doc and aren't bad-ass enough to not need one. And, one could argue, people who just don't want to play the faculty game. I hope we see that space grow in academia. I think we will.