[D] Need advice on handling a difficult ACL ARR situation

Hi everyone

I have been working on a paper about counter-narrative generation.

We first submitted to the October ARR cycle and tried to be as responsible as possible….. we open-sourced the code and masked the data to prevent any harmful applications. We got some constructive feedback(mostly around ethics). One reviewer thought open-sourcing the code could have a “negative impact”, and another straight-up said the whole topic wasn’t suitable for ACL (even though we cited tons of similar works from the ACL community).

For the January resubmission, we made major changes … reframed the paper, strengthened the ethics section, added IRB approval, and included human evaluation.

What is frustrating now is that one reviewer seems to be criticizing points from the older version rather than the current paper, and also suggests there may be some hidden agenda in this research. Another reviewer says the code is not open source and also argues that 5 human evaluators are too few (where there are so many heavily cited works that have 3/5 human evaluators)

I am trying to understand what the best next step is. Has anyone dealt with such a situation?
Would requesting a reviewer change help in a case like this… or is that usually too risky? I have read that such requests may not be approved, and that there is also a chance the reviewer could see it, which makes me worried it could backfire

I would really appreciate any honest advice.