[cycomanic]

I agree with one of the other posters, the result of the study does not highlight a problem that the acceptance of the work is unrelated to the quality. It's more a fact of the distribution of the "quality".

Essentially if you look at review scores for a conference which has say a 40% accept rate (and this is quite similar across fields I'd imagine), you find there's 10-20% (depending on conference) of papers that are clear reject for all reviewers, then there's probably around 10%-15% of papers which are very clear rejects now the rest of the papers are very similar in scores so the cut-off becomes quite arbitrary (and depends on luck as well). This is actually well known for grant applications and a sign that there is likely not enough money in the system.