It's obtuse because you are claiming that the academic peer reviewer's decisions on NIH study sections, for example, are driven not by the quality of the application right in front of them, but by how that application will, in the long-term, alter their own funding possibilities in the future. Maybe in the abstract they know this, but it's not a driver of individual decisions...it's analogous to theories of population level selection in genetics..yes it could happen, but it is much weaker than natural selection at the individual fitness level.

And to be clear, it's not that I am claiming that there are not bad incentive structures in science-- there are; I'm saying that peer reviewer's on grant committees/study sections are not the root of those problems...not propagating those problems with their decision making on individual level grants...it's way too cynical of a suggestion. Instead, blame the laws that govern grant funding mechanisms (we spend way too much time begging for funding instead of doing science), blame Universities for using impact factors and publication counts as proxy metric for researcher quality, etc. But peer review itself? Only if you blame scientists for eating the only food that is given to them by the system-level structures involved. So, yes, obtuse.