[khinsen]

The analysis of the problem is good, but I am not convinced about the solution.

There has never been a central hub for scientific papers, but that has never been a problem. Why should it be a problem for software? We have technologies for making software citable with a DOI, so we could aim for the same network-of-references approach to discoverability that has worked reasonably well for journal articles.

As for impact metrics, they have done more harm than good for papers, so I don't see why should run to make the same mistake for software. Moreover, we could do much better. Given that we are slowly moving towards provenance tracking and workflow management for replicability, we could use that same provenance information for measuring software use in a way that is verifiable and hard to game. I have outlined such an approach in a recent paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.5773.3, see the Conclusions), which should be combined with transitive credit (http://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/jor...). Such a metric would measure how much a piece of software has contributed to published computational results.