Thinking about papers reminded me of something.

I don't remember the exact details, but in grad school, I was working on a paper, and as it got close to time to submit it, my adviser and I had concerns that we'd get someone we didn't like as a referee.  So one day he suggests that we send the paper to Asshole McGee (again, I don't even remember which paper, or who it was) to ask for "comments before we submit."

Then, after we get a response that we thought was full of shit, we added a nice "The authors thank Asshole McGee for insightful comments on the manuscript" note to the acknowledgments, and sent it in, knowing that that would probably be sufficient protection against Asshole McGee ending up as the referee.

I believe it worked, but it's probably best to do sparingly.

For this paper, I care less about who the referee is, as at this point it's a fait accompli.  Sure, there might be organizational or clarification points, but it's hard to take a six year, multi-petabyte reduction set, and come up with substantial issues with it.  They might disagree with what we did, but there's not really a way to tell us that we were wrong.