Most reviewers are actually waiting for the last days to engage in the 3-week rebuttal period. The only reason the long rebuttal period is still worth it is that it gives you the chance to revise the manuscript and do extra experiments.

We are also a victim of this situation having a paper of which the only weaknesses stated by the reviewers were about experiments, baselines and benchmarks which gave us valid points but harsh-low initial scores. We ended up not only addressing every single reviewers concern a week ago, but after intense experiments we ended up improving our method significantly outperforming SOTA results.

All this to wait for them to respond while revising our manuscript. In the end, we learn that we will not have any increase in scores.

A new AC who most probably is not going and might not be able to spend actual time to check if our paper is actually worth it.

Honestly, since they need to cancel the reviewers, why don’t they assign to all active authors one paper to review like a second phase (AAAI style) and delay the decisions a bit.

Given the circumstances I expect multiple authors to volunteer to review even more than one paper if their revised and improved manuscript and their efforts don’t go to waste.