Fantastic over view of current trends in academia. There is truly a huge bias in the research publications. I think blogging is a better way to put forth your ideas and research rather than getting a publication in some cases.
Why not both? Berkeley AI Blog, Stanford AI Blog, CMU ML blog... all show that you can do both. Reviews (part of paper submission process) are legitimately useful, if done well. As a researcher, having Arxiv as a standard medium and conferences to help filter interesting papers (if imperfectly) is also useful.
