I think any alternative system has to figure out how to attract and reward the kind of people who are intrinsically motivated by truth, discovery and knowledge, and repel the kind of people who aren't.
The chief issue with external incentives like "fame" or "money" is that they will attract a lot of people who care about the reward, but not the work. If they can find a way to cut corners, they will. So it works fine if you have a very tight, objective and reproducible evaluation criterion such that you can't get rewarded for poor or sloppy work, but even in science this is difficult to establish, especially in a crowded field where most advancements will be small and incremental. Science works a lot on trust, if only trust that the described experiments were indeed made and the results were indeed as reported.
That's why I feel we get the best science when it's driven by people who just intrinsically want the best science, because getting it right is a reward in and of itself. It'd be neat if it was possible to identify them and just let them cook, regardless of whether results are produced or not. Paradoxically, I think this may be easiest in a setting where academia is undervalued -- the knowledge-seekers will always self-select into research (provided the conditions are good enough and they are not too undervalued), but the fame-chasers will have to find their validation elsewhere.