Over the last view months my experience with article publication through Elsevier has been horrible: the proof, after paper acceptance, used to be just 2 hrs of me reading carefully what they have in their system, now it's months (!) of going back and forth, with Elsevier going out of its way to change equations, shuffle figures, etc. Submitted manuscripts are returned to the author after several weeks because certain required statements (data policy) are supposedly not there, when they absolutely are. I was never a fan, but have never had any issues like that before.
Anyone know what's going on? Did they outsource some more over the last year? Are they in their final throes?