> Sorry, end of rant :)

Don't be. Issues like this are the reason I haven't defended yet. The fact that an AC didn't laugh at that "critique" is itself indicative of a problem. They're as checked out as the reviewers. I was doing work in a more mathy area and could not get assigned reviewers that understood what was being done. To try to get something through I tried a more popular domain, won a bet with my advisor that I could get SOTA on a very popular dataset in a few months, but I have no compute left. I can beat big labs on one dataset with far less compute, but how can I compete when reviewers want dozens? Even if others weren't held to that standard... There's not enough compute for that. You can always have "more experiments"

For review, I set aside hours for each paper, and more the further out of my domain that they are (I'm also very happy to increase my score with a rebuttal and mark lower confidence (I frequently write what would change my mind to help authors). My best post rebuttal ever was "The authors answered all my questions, but due to the lack of novelty I'm lowering my score"). I'll keep doing this, but to be honest, after I defend I have no intention to push to conferences or journals. I just fail to see the value. It has caused me to spend more time rewriting and taking away from research. It just makes me upset and isn't making me a better researcher. I crave for someone to actually _criticize_ my work. I have a good citation count and h-index. My best paper is "unpublished", has hundreds of citations, resulted in a very popular blog post, and years later people are still messaging me for using it in their work. I don't think I'm a top researcher, but I don't think I'm well below the pack.

I just hate that my research directions are pigeonholed. That you need to do topics that people care about. That you need to evaluate with large scale. As if we can't have conclusions beyond the empirical. As if this isn't about communicating our work. That I need to write to those that are not "peers" (niche domain experts, as opposed to broader domain experts). As if experiments aren't proxies, but are demonstrations of a product. I think this significantly slows down the progress to AGI since it causes us to railroad to build from large models from big companies, and there is so little interest in anything else. How can we explore more architectures, learning methods, and all that if we're required to get SOTA out of the gate?

I don't want to say too much about my work since it is still bouncing around in review and I don't want to dox myself. But I'll say something about a work that I __reviewed__. It was for Neural PDEs. Review was for a workshop, and it was clear to me that this paper was rejected from the main conference. What was not clear is why. Until I got to see the reviews form my peers. Their complaints had the standard "novelty" and "not well written" (it was very well written btw), but the kicker for them was that the datasets were synthetic... Like... what?! Why does that even matter? They're solving equations! Luckily they had low confidence and I got the paper through. I wasn't surprised when a few months later I stumbled upon the paper again and found out it was from Welling's group.

> At this point, we just mechanically keep resubmitting the paper every once a while.

I really wonder how long it will take conference organizers to recognize that the noise in the review process is a significant contributor to the increasing number of submissions. This seems a rather obvious connection but I rarely hear it discussed. Not to mention that it can damage papers quality (this certainly happened to mine, and I suspect yours). Reviews can improve the papers if the review contains actual critiques. But hey, why do work when no one questions a reject?

I feel like mine was more ranty lol. But it helps to not feel alone.