After seeing some review comments that make it clear the reviewer either had little knowledge of the field or comments that could have been rebutted by cursory view of the data, this seems like a an area that sorely needs improvement.
>area that sorely needs improvement.
the simplest idea would be to improve peer-reviewing with moving it to something similiar to hacker-news discussion board (but possibly not open to everyone), where reviewers would comment, authors could respond to questions or clarify something.
I’m not convinced that would work. If the problem is the quality of the review it seems like the reviewers need more vetting, not less. I could see the HN version devolving into a lot of wasted effort responding. It would be even worse if it was allowed to be anonymous.
If it wasn’t anonymous and the reviewers were vetted with respect to the field they were commenting on, it might work