First, I agree that publishability should be independent of the results. Do you know anyone who disagrees with this though? That seems to be the standard opinion, yet the situation of filtering by p-value persists.
Also, in the usual case where the null hypothesis is "no difference", no one really cares about what the p-value is telling them anyway. They care "is my theory accurate/true", when their theory predicts something other than the null hypothesis.
I figure we may as well set the significance level in these cases so that everyone "wins", and go on to use analytic techniques that actually address the question of interest.
Also, in the usual case where the null hypothesis is "no difference", no one really cares about what the p-value is telling them anyway. They care "is my theory accurate/true", when their theory predicts something other than the null hypothesis.
I figure we may as well set the significance level in these cases so that everyone "wins", and go on to use analytic techniques that actually address the question of interest.