[KittenInABox]

> The reviews themselves weren't even particularly "insightful", mostly along the lines of "this is confusing, I don't understand what you're doing or why you're doing it", but sometimes you just really need that outside perspective.

IMO maybe scientists should have experience critiquing stuff like poems, short essays, or fiction. Expecting a critiquer to give actually good suggestions matching your original vision, when your original vision's presentation is flawed, is incredibly rare. So the best critiques are usually a "this section right here, wtf is it?" style, with added bonus points to "wtf is this order of information" or other literary technique that is either being misused or unused.

[gms7777]

Oh, I do completely agree and didn't mean to imply otherwise. I have had experiences where reviewers have given me great ideas for new experiments or ways to present things. But the most useful ones usually are the "wtf?" type comments, or comments that suggest the reviewers completely misunderstood or misread the text. While those are initially infuriating, the reviewers are usually among the people in the field that are most familiar with the topic of the paper--if they don't understand it or misread it, 95% of the time it's because it could be written more clearly.