No offense, but astronomy is ripe for being rife with this sort of thing because the validity of astronomical research doesn't matter for the "real world" and can't really easily be tested. I feel like it could be better, but since you guys do not have any external pressures beyond yourselves (as academics), you can still publish however you feel like.

A lot of the more applied fields cannot survive scrutiny. Either you have to produce something that leads to a product or something a PM will scrutinize (especially if you work for a national lab or the like, or for pharma, and so on). There, a lot of published research might be bogus, but it is nowhere near the majority.