Yes, you may be right that the average quality of papers doesn’t differ too much from paper to paper, as least as far as I have seen. And being “hot” or “cold” definitely matters, and sometimes luck plays a role, too: I still remember during the early days of the war in Afghanistan, soon after 9/11, when the only expert on Afghanistan CNN could come up with was some History professor who had studied the British invasion in the 19th century…I’m sure he never thought he ever would be on prime time TV given his obscure field.

As to PLoS ONE, that sounds like a well thought-out attitude. If it is technically sound, the public IS the best judge. If it used, it is good; if not, it will soon be forgotten.

Quality cannot be directly assessed numerically by citations, the best you can hope is that it is accepted by a peer-reviewed journal (which hopefully means the reviewers did not see any obvious flaws). My sense is that for most academic peer-reviewed journals in transportation and planning, the average quality of papers does not differ too much, but higher ranked journals may attract slightly more original work (and more submissions overall). Higher ranked journals probably have a somewhat higher rejection rate as well, but this is highly stochastic process, depending on the luck of the draw and randomness of reviewers, with a slight bias to accepting better papers and rejecting bad papers.

Utility may have a hope being assessed by citations, but really it just depends on if you are in a hot field or sub-field, and who you are (early papers in a particular academic branch will be cited, as will papers by famous people and editors and people likely to be reviewers).

At any rate, I like the philosophy of PLOS One
“Rigorous Peer-Review
Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).”