Even if the interpretation by the reviewer was wrong, it should call attention to a need for rephrasing. Obviously, no one could use this sort of full-blown analysis very often. It's not much fun to do, except in the way that solving calculus problems is fun. And it wouldn't exactly be a pleasure to receive such an analysis. But the method is worth learning, like calculus, because it's an active knowledge rather than a passive one.
Passive knowledge is at best semioperational.
An active knowledge is always operating in the background, activating itself when it's needed. As active knowledge, transformational technique comes to the fore in response to sentences such as I've discussed here. It alerts intuition from background, then brings tools to bear. That was several years ago, before I'd started teaching an elective grammar course. Then, using my trusty bracketing heuristic to isolate main sentence elements, I could tell him about the subject-verb mismatch.