So my supervisor does some digging, and guess who reviewer #5 just so happened to be...
Frack academia
So my supervisor does some digging, and guess who reviewer #5 just so happened to be...
Frack academia
Write to the PC chair and the steering committee of the conference. Those kinds of actions do have consequences. At a minimum you should be able to request a conflict-of-interest review of the situation.
2- Outside of engineering (or at least in the Chemistry/Bio field where I came from), conference submissions are abstracts not papers. There may sometimes be special issues where speakers are invited to submit a paper after the fact. But "paper" here means drafting the full manuscript and submitting it to the publisher when you're ready to be published in a future issue. So no steering committee, just an Editor-in-Chief who conducts research in the field. In fact referencing conference abstracts was always frowned upon because they never contained enough information to be properly scrutinized.
Speaking of, this whole "reputable papers only happen with conferences" phenomenon was unheard of to me until I joined an engineering company