Thank you for your response, it has been very helpful, and I am grateful for it.
First off - congratulations, that is exciting you have gotten in! Second - that sounds like a fantastic paper!
I do actually wonder if this might be part of it - that paper is clearly something that would be interesting to read. Examples of my papers are, for instance, discussing double affection in Kant using the standard big-deal Kantians, discussing self-recognition in Hegel using some McDowell, etc. These do seem... boring in comparison. Part of my interest here is selfish: I am also dead tired of working on boring history of phil papers when I could be doing philosophy instead of just working on making old papers as academic as possible. I have not had time to publish anything since I cannot work on new stuff and no lower level journal will publish this kind of history stuff.
I've been trying for around 5 years now, so it's not just this years' constraints. Somehow I am filtering myself right into the middle of the pile every year, but never getting out. Thank you for your help!