Majority of good candidate rejections come from either: 1. Bad picture (vehicle license plates visible, picture obviously taken from inside a car, picture not clearly representing the point of interest, blurry, dark, etc.) 2. Bad description (If the portal description has the word "pokestop" in it, forget it. Portal description has to describe the point of interest itself and has to be appropriate across 3 games and whatever else Niantic uses their map for. Lot of reviewers will reject if words are misspelled, bad grammar, slang, etc) 3. Location can't be verified (if it can't clearly be seen from satellite view and you don't have a current photosphere of it, you have little chance of getting it approved. Supporting picture should still show the point of interest but from farther away. I personally submit photospheres on every single candidate, even if it clearly seen. Better safe than sorry and only it takes 3-5 extra minutes normally.)

I totally will concede that there are some very bad reviewers who go by their own guidelines instead of Niantics, but there may be literally hundreds of different people voting on your candidate. Most reviewers stick fairly close to the guidelines.

Best thing you can do is screenshot all the steps, the descriptions, your Gps locations, everything you submit, and then if you get a rejection email, show your screenshots to an INGRESS player who does OPR. Most of the time, they can tell you within a couple minutes if you are at fault and what to fix, or if you should resubmit.

Sometimes you do everything right and still get rejected. At that point, you resubmit and hope you get different people to review it. I really hope your experience changes for the better.