I wanted to echo this experience. I agree that reviewers are generally looking for novelty and difficulty. Unfortunately, difficulty can translate into a syst

I wanted to echo this experience. I agree that reviewers are generally looking for novelty and difficulty. Unfortunately, difficulty can translate into a system where reviewers create small fiefdoms: This isn't difficult enough for my journal, so I'm going to reject it. I say fiefdoms because I don't often see criteria for what difficult means, so it's left to individual reviewers and the editor to decide. Anyway, this creates some perverse incentives where it's now necessary to make a piece of work appear more difficult than it really is. That said, I don't really think this is all that unique to academic publishing. At some point, I think we've all met someone professionally who makes problems sound more difficult than they really are and seen this person rewarded by management because they're the person who can work on really difficult problems.