I read these unicorn articles and at first think, hey, I'm one of those guys, meaning it can't be that hard. I am no genius, just a decently hard working individual that tends that likes to do things right. I feel comfortable in both worlds, I lead a design team and also lead the direction of some of the engineering efforts of a decent size team (20+).
That being said, it's hard to do both at scale or really well. One is going to suffer as soon as the project gets to a decent size, I notice this every time I try and do it myself. So, props to people who can produce extremely high quality code and designs, that takes a serious focus.
I've worked in Scientific Websites (Biocompare the main one) for 6 years, and I love what Science Exchange is doing. The old guard of distributor networks, old boy research journals and closed research communities. It's taken a while but the industry is ready.
Biocompare received the same reaction when they launched - "scientists like their distributors and the free swag they get", "they'll never order products themselves". Research is ready for a disruption.
One property my company holds, http://www.dentalcompare.com has been affected. It's a classic product comparison site (with a lot of problems) but there is not "farming" of content. Every company provides their products and every article is original or at most, a small abstract.