Rejection for a seemingly odd reason I sent a paper to an elite journal (the top in the field). Two weeks later I got a decision "reject" but the editors added that "we believe it should deserve a good publicity and publication".
The paper was described by the associate editor as "of very good quality" and the reason for the rejection is that "the techniques used look rather far to me from the journal readership".
It should be mentioned that the main results of the paper are very much related to the scope of the journal. Moreover, this journal has already published more than 5 papers on the subject with results similar to those of mine (but in rather special cases, and according to few experts in the field no doubt that my new result is a significant step forward).
My questions are:

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*Is it common that a paper that contains results of high enough quality that are well in line with the journal scope, is rejected because the techniques are not familiar to the readership?


*If it is common, could anyone explain the reason behind this policy? To me it seems odd, as in mathematics applying tools from one subject to solve problems in another subject, as long as it is done correctly, is considered to be a good development.
 A: When you submit to an elite journal, expect a rejection most of the time.  Then submit to a less-prestigious journal.  It is a waste of your time to attempt an analysis of the reasons given for rejection.

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*Yes, it is common for journals that receive far more submissions than they can publish to reject most of them — sometimes for boilerplate reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.

A: If I understand you correctly, you have proven a result in field X using techniques from field Y.
And you have tried to get this published in "Journal of field X".
What the editor is trying to tell you is that it might be more suitable for "Journal of field Y".
You would probably have to add more motivation since Y people doesn't care much about X results.
On the other hand Y people cares a lot about their field being useful to outsiders.
So:

Lately a lot of work have been done by people in field X trying to prove the John Doe conjecture. [ref] However, only a  few special cases has been solved. [ref][ref][ref]
In this paper I show that applying methods from field Y, in particular yadda yadda[ref], allows us to solve far more general cases.
...

