You are absolutely right. It is so hard to get a good public interest on something like this.
Have you heard of the Heart Foundation Tick or something similar on food where the food product gets to display the tick if and only if it meets some predefined criteria and then this tick helps the customer know what is the best product to buy? Maybe a paper could have a similar thing. What you need though is a group of independent people to start, endorse it, regulate it and then also market it.
Imagine being the person behind something like that .... clearly I should be the first author if you publish a paper on it though haha!
RE: Academic Authorship - Anything Goes!