No process involving judgement can ever be truly fair and objective, the question comes down to whether the peer review process is somehow fundamentally flawed and needs to be changed. Any process will make mistakes or be influenced by outside forces. I personally can't see any kind of significant change that could be done to make the peer review system better.

And to answer AgoraBasta's statement, "The irresponsibility of reviewers' judgements is a real problem". I'm still not convinced that there is a significant problem with the peer review system. This is a tough thing to investigate though, ancedotal evidence appears to be the only type of evidence to go on in this situation and that type of evidence is weak. I'm not willing to conclude that the system is flawed because of a few individual examples where people didn't get published, especially when we don't have both sides of the story.

If people feel that personal influences are systemically sabatoging the peer review process, how did you come to that conclusion? (For the record, I've never published a scientific paper so I'm asking the question to try to get further insight into the matter).