The issue here wasn't that the reviewers couldn't handle a new idea. They were all very familiar with word embeddings and ways to make them. There weren't a lot

The issue here wasn't that the reviewers couldn't handle a new idea. They were all very familiar with word embeddings and ways to make them. There weren't a lot a of new concepts in word2vec, what distinguished it was that it was simple, fast, and good quality. The software and pretrained vectors were easy to access and use compared to existing methods.