Latest review
First review round: 8.6 weeks. Overall rating: 1 (bad).
Outcome: Rejected.
Motivation:
The handling of this manuscript at all levels was somewhere between incompetent and unethical. The first pair of reviews wasn't so great, but at least resubmission was solicited. The one review of the revision was very brief and made the bizarre claims that (1) what I'm trying to do is categorically impossible, which if true would invalidate literally thousands of papers that use such approaches; and (2) there are too many papers of this kind in the literature already – not that the topic is boring, but rather that they don't want more research published in this area regardless of whether it's novel and sound. The handling editor accepted the latter argument, which is anti-scientific. The three editors-in-chief said specifically that they "discussed and agreed the decision", so it wasn't an oversight on their part.