Same here. I have two pending papers at the moment. Both got that beautiful remark "publish with minor changes" and I hope to see them soon. But I am also working on countless seminars and more papers so hopefully it will be worth the effort.

And that is the sad thing right, we do it for the sake of doing it almost? The end product is not why we do it, we do it for all the reasons you listed, basically then to change the way we think about things.

But luckily, I have to say, I got it lucky, or I got handed a PhD student's dream: an unexplored region in the field with almost nothing published in it. I think there is one article published on the topic and one in pre-print. And then my two articles if or when they get published. On the one hand, a new field is scary because you have nothing to fall back onto, but on the other hand, it is so nice to produce something without real restrictions because nothing has been said and done in the field.

In the end, we do it for ourselves I would argue. We do it because we love the field and want to see it grow. Or something cheesy like that.