I have no serious involvement in academia. What is the proportion of work that gets reviewed by someone with an axe to grind? I don’t doubt that it happens regularly but I have no conception of the magnitude of the problem.
Hence, they will sometimes try to make sure you don't publish or at least get downgraded to sister journals, such as Nature Communications.
Another problem are editorial decisions. Great work is often desk rejected because it's judged not to be significant or interersting enough (usually the author comes from a less prominent university).
For example, the original CRISPR article was desk rejected by most journals and the fact that the author's affiliation was a no-name research centre in Alicante (Spain) surely played a role. This delayed CRISPR getting widely known by a few years...
This is interesting. Has there been a write up on this saga anywhere?
I'm so glad to be out of that world, to be honest.