You don't think there is a problem with it being that easy to convincingly refute articles in the most prestigious science journals? I think that encouraging those refutations would be good, both to force the reviewers to do a better job and as you said encourage opportunists to poke hole in existing papers. It would be good if a significant amount of scientists built their entire career around poking hole in bad papers like this.
Technically, not a refutation because a statistical analysis never refutes a hypothesis, only supports it with a certain probability or does not support it. That is, a negative result is inconclusive. No, I do not think "poking holes" should be incentivised - I believe REPLICATIONS of studies should be incentivised, because every study = a sample. Statistically, the more samples, the better able we are to filter through the noise. What you suggest will encourage scientific sensationalism.
