Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).
On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[*] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself.
[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!
> it could be reviewers and others intentionally trying to sabotage other people's work
Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about the topic being discussed would know that everything I described happens after reviewers and editors approve the manuscript. At this stage, they have all long since ended their involvement in the process.
As with most conspiracy theories, this "theory" reveals much about you, but fails to say anything at all about the topic at hand. [1]
The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).