Illustration, slightly edited to protect anonymity: "paper feels incremental ..putting together well-known ideas in a straightforward manner." What can I say? Previous work missed even these. And straightforward once done. Reviewer also admitted not reading the proof. Great job?!
ICML review rant: The ML community is screwed if we keep insisting that scientific inquiry about known algorithms isn't "novel" (even if it leads to major new capabilities / SoTA), but that engineering yet another new, incremental algorithm that we know nothing about is great.