[Balgair]

5+ Years PhD programs are completely unnecessary. After quals, you should do some research and write that up. The research may take a year, it may take two, it depends. Write it up and publish it. Do that again, maybe, it depends.

One of many hiccups is in the submitting and review process. It takes ages. Sure, some areas are less, some are more, but three year long submit/review periods are not unheard of. Reviewers want another experiment, another control, they don't get back to you until February even though you submitted in mid-November, you can forget August as a working month, etc. Unless your PI is well connected, getting published takes forever.

I have a paper that has been in reviewer hell for the last seven years, for example. It's nutters.

[foldr]

> It's nutters.

Indeed. And the dirty secret of this process is that it has little to do with ensuring research quality (although it does usually succeed in filtering out very bad research as a side effect). Its main purpose is to simply make it difficult to publish, so as to preserve the CV value of a publication in a given journal.