The webinar is very good, but it makes me feel that there were more soft rejections in the past than nowadays. What could be soft rejection earlier turned to hard rejection later. It’s a question of an influence level. Despite all discussions about inconsistency I agree that reviewers are not obliged to assign thousands of tasks to authors who have their own free will to compose and change their music at their discretion.
As Adrien Gardiner said here — A Transparent Treatise of Inconsistency in AJ Review and Author Processes - Envato Forums
«One of the challenging realities we often encounter on Envato Markets is that many newer and aspiring authors anticipate the commercial stock industry to operate as a school environment.»
We are not students here and what stands behind a hard rejection (besides “Something wrong”) is " We respect your vision, but this is just not proper here in these conditions".
For example, tons of music I may like to listen, would be hard rejected, despite its CD releases and fame; something because of a narrow niche, something because of specific samples/mixing/mastering/arrangement…
Well, in a case of a hard rejection we don’t get a request to fully rework a composition. As I have seen in topics here, it’s just enough to find a weakness and work on it.