Thanks for the link to the reviewers' comments. I am not an academic, and I found some of the objections surprising, such as this one that might be seen as suggesting that the authors just had the wrong attitude:

"However, I think there's some chance that if the same tasks were in the hands of people who wanted CNNs or CNN+RN to work well, the results might have been different."

The reviewer goes on to write that he cannot say what people with the proper attitude would do differently.