The basic incentive structure doesn’t make any sense at all for peer review. It is a great system for passing around a paper before it gets published, and detecting if it is a bunch of totally wild bullshit that the broader research community shouldn’t waste their time on.

For some reason we decided to use it as a load-bearing process for career advancement.

These back-and-forths, halfassed papers and reviews (now halfassed with AI augmentation) are just symptoms of the fact that we’re using a perfectly fine system for the wrong things.