IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics

Cautiously submit after changing the new editor-in-chief.
In the first round, it took three and a half months, with a reject and resubmit decision.
Before the second round of submission, the editor-in-chief was replaced. The second round of review took three months, including three weeks for EIC decision, resulting in a rejection.
Among the three reviewers in the second round, two had positive opinions, while the other one did not provide any new opinions compared to the first round. However, the editor-in-chief directly rejected the submission, citing the same reasons mentioned by others, stating that only the very top quality and highly relevant submissions could be accepted due to a high number of submissions. During the argument process via email, the editor-in-chief even fabricated some reasons that the reviewers never mentioned, claiming that the reviewers declined the submission for these reasons. Therefore, it seems that the editor-in-chief rejected the submission based purely on personal preference. Additionally, the editor-in-chief's actions were not in accordance with standard procedures, as they did not check the cover letter. When responding to this issue during the argument, they evaded the topic.
In summary, the current journal is unfriendly, and acceptance seems to depend solely on the editor-in-chief's mood, resembling a lottery. The review period is also relatively slow.

It took 20 months from submission to finally being accepted, which was quite sudden.
2020-09-13 submitted
2021-03-21 reject and resubmit
2021-05-15 accept as regular paper
The whole process was quite frustrating. Our project was about multiphase flow and signal processing, which has already produced four papers, including ones with an impact factor of 10+. It was difficult to accept the direct rejection after a 6-month review (so unfair...). Later, I found out that this seems to be a common practice in IEEE... The evaluation scores during rejection were one good, one fair, one minor revision, and one poor. Looking back, it is true that the version still needed some polishing. Along with the other authors, we worked day and night (after all, we can't expect the professors to stay up late, unfortunately) for over a month, completely revising the entire article. We even made additions and changes to the experimental section, reaching over 80%+. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, communication with the professor was delayed from Christmas until March (helpless). After resubmission, it took a month to become "awaiting EIC decision." After about two weeks, my colleague suddenly excitedly informed me that it had been accepted, without any further revisions needed (shocked).