Yeah, honestly the only reason I submit to conferences now is because my advisor asks me to. If it was up to me I would submit exclusively to journals or just to arxiv/open review directly. I think I'll do this when I graduate (soon).
As for the reason why it happens in conferences, I think it may actually be a different set of reviewers. While journal reviewers are going to be conference reviewers, I don't think the other way around is true. I think conferences tend to just have a larger number of shitty reviewers (as well as more shitty submissions). And as you note, it is quite easy to misunderstand a work, doubly so when you're reading under a time constraint. It just makes for a noisy process, especially when reviewers view their job as to reject (not improve). I just think it is a bad system with a bad premise that can't really be fixed.
For conference reviewing, I always try to write what would change my mind and if I think the authors should resubmit to another venue. But even reviewing I don't feel authors get a fair shot at responding. They can't address all my comments while addressing others in a single page.
Edit: I saw your bio. I actually have a SOTA work that is rejected (twice). Good performance jump with large parameter drop. But just couldn't tune or run enough datasets because compute limited. Conferences are fun.
As for the reason why it happens in conferences, I think it may actually be a different set of reviewers. While journal reviewers are going to be conference reviewers, I don't think the other way around is true. I think conferences tend to just have a larger number of shitty reviewers (as well as more shitty submissions). And as you note, it is quite easy to misunderstand a work, doubly so when you're reading under a time constraint. It just makes for a noisy process, especially when reviewers view their job as to reject (not improve). I just think it is a bad system with a bad premise that can't really be fixed. For conference reviewing, I always try to write what would change my mind and if I think the authors should resubmit to another venue. But even reviewing I don't feel authors get a fair shot at responding. They can't address all my comments while addressing others in a single page.
Edit: I saw your bio. I actually have a SOTA work that is rejected (twice). Good performance jump with large parameter drop. But just couldn't tune or run enough datasets because compute limited. Conferences are fun.