A quick comment about point 2: A lot of academia is about quantity over quality these days. One high-impact, well-designed paper with strong conclusions could very well be worth more than 50 weaker papers. Unfortunately these days, many people, especially those outside of the field, may perceive the 50 weaker-paper lab(s) to be more "efficient" than the 1 strong-paper lab.
> One high-impact, well-designed paper with strong conclusions could very well be worth more than 50 weaker papers.
This is true. Assessing impact is difficult, and journal impact factor is not a great proxy. However, at least in my field, most Nature and Science papers aren't worth 50 second- or even third-tier papers.
In my field (chemistry) plenty of people utterly loathe high-impact factor journal papers. They do something that looks impressive, but are a useless source of detail on _how_ it was actually accomplished, since more often then not they omit - not intentionally really - something which turns out to be very important to the process.
Several simpler papers not trying to be as dramatic are going to be far more insightful since you get the descriptions of what was found _not_ to work about the method they were trying to replicate. Weaker papers - to me - are gold, since they're what you publish when you were trying to copy something and it just doesn't work as well as is being claimed.
Yes, the risk-taking strategy of working towards a potentially high-impact publication is not worth the reward (as measured in citation rate comparing low-impact and high-impact articles )- see Foster et al Tradition and Innovation in Scientists Research Strategies http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6906.pdf
