[bonoboTP]

Right, I think many people believe peer review to be some big expert committee giving a paper lots of analysis and evaluation. In reality they are mostly PhD students with 1-5 years experience, not experts with decades of experience and one person may get like 5-10 papers to review at a time. Oh and it's unpaid work that gets time away from your own research and is not really incentivized beyond a vague sense of moral duty towards the progress of mankind's knowledge. The end result is that it's mostly pattern matching, does it look like the typical paper in the field? The gut reaction and impression strongly influences the decision, then the actual review is about justifying that decision.

I mean it's not totally arbitrary, really good reviewers do give it like 2-5 hours, but it's best thought of as a rudimentary filter rather than a meticulous verification.