Typically, a scientific conference works like this (certainly in the areas in which I have worked): authors submit papers with a strict page limit n, struggle to fit their exciting work into n pages, get reviews, then if the paper is accepted they have to address a pile of reviewers comments about the paper, and squeeze all of this into the same number of pages. Of course, reviewers rarely ask for things to be taken out: most comments are “clarify this”, “explain this in more detail”, “give the parameters/pseudocode for this”, “do some more experiments do whatever and include the results”. Of course, this is impossible, and so we end up taking out more of the stuff that made the paper comprehensible in the first place.
Suggestion: instead of having the same page limit for both phases, have a page limit of n+1 or n+2 for the final version; then, the authors can have a hope of address the reviewer’s comments properly. I’ve come across this idea discussed a couple of times, but I can’t remember it being used for real.
And whilst we’re on the subject, why do we care about strict page limits in an age where the ink is mostly bits anyway…but that is probably an argument for another day.