Christmas and New Year Surprise ?

I submitted my manuscript on 11/21 and got the response from the journal on Christmas Eve. My editor is R. Heald in Berkeley.

There were only two reviewers. Reviewer #1 thinks it is a little bit short for making a significant advance to match the high standard of the journal, and also suggests lots of live-imaging work.

In contrast, Reviewer #2 feels enthusiastic about the work and believes it is well suited for publication, no additional experiment is required, with suggestion rewriting to make certain points more clear.

Heald, as an editor, is ambiguous but seems to take a position closer to Reviewer #1, asking us to address the questions from Reviewer #1. However, the problem is, even we finish all suggested experiments, which provide no further "ADVANCED" information at all from our view, very likely we'll get same comments from Reviewer #1 after the revision.

After discussion with Tim on 12/28, we emailed Heald first asking what the bottom line is, and then to decide if it's worthy doing those time-costing experiments, or simply send our paper to somewhere else.

Today, the first working day after the New Year's Day, I received the reply from Heald. The Reviewer #3 just came in, and made a similar comments as Reviewer #2, that is, no more experiments need to be done, but suggests to rewrite the paper and make it more concise. This time, Heald took a totally opposed position compared with her first E-mail, said she thinks we will not require additinoal experiments, just rewrite the manuscript as reviwer #2 & #3 suggested.

Seems to be a big relief, although to cut the manuscript down is not an easy job, at least I can spend my time on something new.