Personally, as a professional researcher, I think we "should" have a method by which credential claims can be verified. But of course I'm biased like that.
I agree.
I also think we should roll back about 90 percent of the bots and the low-response action-pages like blacklist, whitelist, etc. where one or two people control the entire apparatus.
How would that help anything? The bots and action-pages are serving a useful purpose. Just because only a handful of people are interest in doing the busy work doesn't means they control it - anyone can come along and help out, they just don't.