The whole subject of science has degenerated into a cacophony of psycobabble.
And little wonder, since the loss of public education in this country and Mike McCormick's permanent castration of basic research in the late 70's, there has been very little capability for critical and/or creative thought coming into physics and other sciences for the past several decades.
Referees have always (since the earliest days of science and philosophy) been thought to be a_holes by those whose articles have been severely criticized or rejected for publication or presentation.
In addition, outfits like NSF went from being a good-old-boys network comprised of very competent scientists to a political network of anal hacks.
It's only going to get worse, unless someone comes along with the balls to start all over by abolishing government schools and the Fabians scum that control them. Then, and only then, is there a long-term hope that science can be restored to the levels of the 17th, 18th, and first 75 years off the 20th centuries.
Ernest Lawrence, a pure experimentalist... said, "Don't you worry about it -- the theorists will find a way to make them all the same." -- Alvarez by Luis Alvarez (page 184)
I must reiterate my feeling that experimentalists always welcome the suggestions of the theorists. But the present situation is ridiculous... In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me that he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because my track record was good. I believe U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and-true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and that I've seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China. -- ibid (pp 200-201)