Blatherskite: Musings on editing, writing, and fiction

I think it's probably peer review in general. Reviewers are human, and if they don't fully get the subtleties of statistics, they won't catch errors when they review a problematic paper. This is one reason many weak papers get published that should, perhaps, have been sent back to the drawing board.

But the larger problem is that doing peer review right is, as you note, difficult and time-consuming. It takes more time to do it right than many researchers are willing to allocate. The reviews I see range from cursory to insightful and rigorous; the former are the problem.