PBRF Changes: Encouraging On-Going Fiddling with the Rules While the Academy Burns?

Over the last 18 years successive governments have tried various schemes to reward and encourage good research, without actually conducting much research into the effectiveness of the rewards and discouragements inherent in their schemes. Universities have been very quick to analyse where the weaknesses in the successive formats gave them opportunities to promote their stronger players, and hide their weaker ones, to the point where the focus of universities seems to have become playing the rules, rather than actually supporting good research.