Citing sources would be a nice plus, but I think it still suffers from the issue that primary research always has caveats and limitations. And you need a certain amount of domain knowledge to know how strong the conclusions are.

I've come to believe that "critical thinking" is often a matter of knowing which expert to trust. And sometimes, knowing who to trust is difficult.

I wouldn't say so. Original sources can be in disagreement with each other, and can be wrong. Without much effort, you can generally find some scholarly article to use as ammunition for whatever argument you want to make, and then find another one to make the opposite case. And of course, increasingly, such articles don't hold up to much scrutiny anyway.