Interesting story. Getting accepted in peer journals is not easy in any profession.

I suspect that English is not your first language. I can see a lot of struggles trying to create those high-calibre sentences and paragraphs to meet the expectations of the reviewers who may or may not be united in their expectations of how your paper should be constructed. If the English is a little off, they will jump to conclusions that just may not be there.

And it seems you found some experienced people to help you with the writing. And their influence also challenged the reviewers not be so arbitrary. Nothing wrong with that.

And in my two former professions of petroleum engineering and business English, the quality of papers coming from the first profession was quite high, but the second profession was rather dismal. I remember reading journal of Business English teachers from China. I could not understand their English.