Dear e,
It seems to me you have a very strong prejudice against PhD per se.

I dunno about PhD in pure finance and economics, what they require and all. As to your claims on "just study a few more years and write a few more papres and get published", I don't think its that simple. A lot people I know drop out of PhD or fail them because they can hardly publish anything. The requirements of PhD looks deceptively, emphasis on deceptively, simple.

The difficulty of PhD are as follows:
1. The meaning of PhD is to introduce a new philosophy (not application) to way things are being done in the world today. Philosophy can translate to design theory, models and the like. Thus, having novelty + stamping your claim on it is extremely difficult. Masters and Bachelor degrees are not required to have philosophical novelty. That said, I am not sure if most honorary PhDs have introduced some form of philosophical novelty in their fields. If they have, I respect them and they deserved their PhD.

2. Writing a paper and a thesis is not as easy as it seems. Having good results does not mean writing good papers, i.e., have good positive experimental results does not mean you can publish. Publishing a journal paper requires a lot of thought and formal wording. The hardest portions to write in a journal paper are the classifications, your theory and the introduction. Especially the introduction. It's takes a long thought and writing process to hatch a journal. It's an even longer time for a thesis, so I hope you can respect and am aware of that. Maybe you can try writing solid journal paper to realize the difficulty of it.

In academia you do need luck to be famous, luck in finding the relevant topics + industrial funding. Usually they get famous at conferences, where it is easier to display their results.

Journals are meant for people in the community, and in the industry so it may not be of value to people outside of the community. Thats the purpose of it.

PhD does have its value, and great things can come out of it. People like Rudolf Kalman, Claude Shannon, R.A. Fisher have come up with great things for engineering and IT.

Of course some may laugh at Robert Merton, Myron Scholes and Fischer Black, who are PhD Nobel Laureates, E Derman for the introduction of Quantitative Finance with the collapse of LTCM ( in fact it's collapse is not totally due to their mathematical models). IMHO, I think people who think this way are small, jealous, ignorant and short sighted, cos it's only one extreme case out of many (who criticises D.E.Shaw and Citadel?). If not for these people, I dont' think there be as big a market for derivatives and MFE programs.