[tensor]

I reviewed many papers when I was still in academia, I know how it works thank you. Yes I too have declined to review a paper or two because they reached out to the wrong person.

But no, I don't agree with you in your stringent definition of expert. IF someone is in the general area and is aware of the problem you are trying to solve, that is good enough. E.g. someone who is in machine learning and aware of diffusion, has read papers on it, but has not done work on it themselves, is a good enough of an expert to review a diffusion paper.

These papers are supposed to be written to a general enough academic audience that someone like the above is able to understand and critique your work.

Also, if you are as experienced as you claim to be, you should know that conferences are notorious for having FAR weaker peer review than actual journals. That's why many works used have both a conference version and a larger journal version. For conferences, due to the time limits on review, they often don't have enough qualified papers to review them all. There are also no do overs, if you get an unqualified reviewer you can't request another person.

There are even papers published about the poor quality of conference reviews!

[godelski]

  > Also, if you are as experienced as you claim to be, you should know that conferences are notorious for having FAR weaker peer review than actual journals.

Yes, but conferences are the primary publishing venue used in computer science and ML. Publishing in NeurIPS, CVPR, or ICML is more prestigious than publishing in JMLR or TMLR

While worse at conferences, I are, the fundamental problems are similar. They exacerbate the problems, but it's still the same problems

And please don't be offended. I'm writing to a general audience. I don't know if you have academic experience or not until you tell me. It seems you agree it would not be appropriate for me to assume otherwise