Had one paper with 5 reviewers: 4 thought it was pretty good or awesome, the 5th not... With about 7 pages' worth of criticism that were mostly invalid. I resubmit, with modifications. That same week a paper of virtually the same study (not plagiarized, just coincidentally the same study) is published by a heavyweight 6 hours up the road from us. So reviewer 5 says, even if the modifications are good enough, this has already been done by a bigger, better researcher and is therefore not original. Paper gets rejected outright.
So my supervisor does some digging, and guess who reviewer #5 just so happened to be...
Write to the PC chair and the steering committee of the conference. Those kinds of actions do have consequences. At a minimum you should be able to request a conflict-of-interest review of the situation.
2- Outside of engineering (or at least in the Chemistry/Bio field where I came from), conference submissions are abstracts not papers. There may sometimes be special issues where speakers are invited to submit a paper after the fact. But "paper" here means drafting the full manuscript and submitting it to the publisher when you're ready to be published in a future issue. So no steering committee, just an Editor-in-Chief who conducts research in the field. In fact referencing conference abstracts was always frowned upon because they never contained enough information to be properly scrutinized.
Speaking of, this whole "reputable papers only happen with conferences" phenomenon was unheard of to me until I joined an engineering company
I'm confused. You had 5 reviewers for an abstract and one of them produced 7 pages of criticism? I'm aware of many venues in Chem that are abstract submission, but it sounds like you were in a full-paper situation.
OP never said it was an abstract - they are from chem/bio (like me), where papers are submitted primarily to journals, not conferences. They mentioned abstracts in response to your comment about writing to the "steering committee of the conference"
Academia is fundamentally broken. All the incentives are messed up and I have a hard time trusting anything that has been "researched" at all. Really disappointing.
So my supervisor does some digging, and guess who reviewer #5 just so happened to be...
Frack academia