If you defend the peer-review system in its current from, you either:
- Are not a scientist.
- Have never published anything.
- Have never reviewed anything.
- Are abusing the system yourself, either directly or through an influential supervisor.

Besides very specific niche areas of math and physics, where this seemingly works as intended, literally everyone I met has more bad stories than good to tell about peer review. Arbitrary rejections, arbitrary acceptances, always at least one very unhelpful reviewer, arbitrary demands. It gets even worse the more local you get (grant and project proposals, meetings, etc).

"B-but it's the best we got".
Why can't we seriously just start doing fully open peer reviews were reviewers can't anonymously get away with le epic arbitrary bullshit?