I had dinner with Ginsparg once and he's a wonderful guy. I'm glad the arxiv was created when it was, in an earlier less scammy era of the internet. Otherwise the nowadays equivalent might be owned by Elsevier or some random tech company.

Getting stuck in their review / re-categorization process sucks. It’s not transparent, can take awhile, and often the outcome (their choice of category) doesn’t make sense. My experiences were primarily in optics and physics, with a bit of ML.

I wonder if the moderators are somewhat disconnected from the communities that they are moderating. Or, at least, if they are active researchers maybe they aren’t fully aware of all the trends in certain sub fields their area covers.