[throwaway287391]

Sorry if this comes across as harsh but I'm really not understanding your grievance.

> They wanted a lot more demonstrable outcomes. I walked away. I found peer review very upsetting. It felt like nobody actually cared about what I was trying to say.

> Oh, and 'this technique is interesting' doesn't seem to cut it as a paper subject.

Well, yeah? To invoke an HN cliche, "ideas are cheap". Why should anyone else care about your idea if you can't be bothered to show it actually does something interesting on some specific problem(s) or even motivate why it might be expected to do something interesting in light of what's already out there? Without any expectation of experimental validation, conferences would basically be giant circle-jerks filled with completely inconsequential "interesting ideas".

And it sounds like you took the feedback from your first round of peer review and revised your work in light of those critiques and got your resubmission accepted. That seems like a pretty good experience to me, knowing many academics with multiple experiences of resubmitting work 3+ times (with new results and revisions each iteration) before acceptance. I'm not saying that any peer review process is perfect by any means, but it's a very important filter and in this case it honestly sounds like the criticism you got when your paper rejected was pretty fair...

[ggm]

I have no grievance. I gave an experience summary. I think my expectations did not match reality and I was reset.