[cefstat]

Is this really what happened? The post from the conference chairs is extremely confusing. Maybe my confusion is because I've never published in a conference with reciprocal reviewers and if I had this experience maybe the post would be very clear.

In any case, I had reached the same interpretation before reading your post, thinking that this is the only interpretation that could make any sense, but I'm still not convinced that this is what happened. Hopefully, no "innocent authors' articles were rejected because they happened to go to a bad reviewer".