Getting a paper published

Our paper was returned back from JBC with a comment:

The experimental work appears solid but incremental.

Therefore, it cannot be published.

Never mind that we showed a paradigm shift by our experiments, mapped the interaction region, used thermodynamics to show one path is preferred over the other! The reviewer is convinced that is just incremental.

I guess I had would not have been annoyed if the reviewer had pointed out the flaws or if the editor had said it was beyond the scope of the journal and suggested where we can submit the work. To dismiss the entire work as just a teeny bit incremental (which by the way is such a subjective term) is annoying least to say.

The only recourse I have is to submit the paper to another journal and write a rebuttal letter to the editor of JBC.