We all complain about peer review, particularly when our best work is rejected by every journal from Nature Genetics down to that journal that will publish anything, so that it finally appears in a volume to honor some guy that only he will read.
However, sometimes an anonymous reviewer will identify an important flaw in a paper that you can fix before it’s published, thus saving you from potential public embarrassment.
That happened to me again today. I finally got the reviews back for a paper, eight weeks after it was submitted. I had become a bit impatient, but one of the reviewers identified a hole in our theory section, which we can now fix before publication (I think we figured it out this afternoon), thus avoiding public embarrassment, except for the fact that I’m currently pointing it out publicly.
Complaints about the peer review process are not unlike a common complaint about statisticians: that we are a barrier to scientists publishing what they know to be true. That is sometimes the case, but at other times, both reviewers and statisticians can help you to avoid embarrassing yourself.