Yikes, and I have a paper in the oven I'm hoping to submit to CCS this year... I suppose my mental image was influenced by less flashy conferences along the lin

Yikes, and I have a paper in the oven I'm hoping to submit to CCS this year... I suppose my mental image was influenced by less flashy conferences along the lines of https://cie2013.wordpress.com/registration/ https://cie2013.wordpress.com/registration/. For what it's worth, I don't think there is any reason to assume the peer review and publishing effort put in by CiE is of lower quality - though its acceptance rate is likely to be higher than that of CCS, which may play a role if attendance is closer to being proportional to how much they accept than to how much is submitted.