[johnnyanmac]

>As a final note our experience has been that the higher you go the more consistent and reasonable review becomes, but the front-line reviewers often take stupid, unreasonable positions like you'd see in a Hacker News comment

A sadly universal experience. Especially when the not-so-secret is that that frontline is often contracted or outsourced. They do not understand (by design) the subtleties of submission of creative content. They are simply cheap help to do the bare minimum to remove liability, and if a few false negatives happen during that time, oh well. thousands of other apps in the sea.

So like everything else, if you havev the money, clout, or simply sheer persistence (which shouldn't be necessary) then you can force yourself to someone who can actually help. But few will get there, even with persistance.