The system is working as designed. This may be the problem.
Publishing receives far more good manuscripts than it can acquire. It depends on agents, comparison titles, established categories and quick internal decisions to make the volume manageable. Those tools are understandable. They also miss books.
Minor Human Error is an independent publisher being built for speculative novels that are difficult to pitch in a sentence but remarkably easy to keep reading.
The Martian, the Bobiverse novels and Dungeon Crawler Carl followed different routes, but each found a substantial audience after beginning outside the neat conventional path. They do not prove that every rejected manuscript is secretly a bestseller. They prove that the usual path does not possess complete information about what readers will love.
We want to build another entrance. We are doing it slowly, transparently and with an unreasonable commitment to making the winning book succeed.