My personal theory is that due to all of the lay-offs that Google had, they were short staffed and couldn't handle the load for verification. They needed more people and they didn't have the budget so they had to outsource it to people in call centers who may not do the best job. Additionally, they are cracking down a lot more and profiles that should never be flagged for verification are being flagged. Due to new untrained people, who do lower quality work, and with an increase in profiles requiring verification you get the unfortunate result that videos that were just fine don't go through. Hopefully this will get better over time as more of these people are better trained and the load of verification goes down so they are allowed to take more time to make better decisions.
I imagine these people aren't penalized for kicking a profile back for additional verification but will be penalized for letting a profile in that could violate the guidelines.
Some things you can do - 1) contact support, 2) try again and hope you get a new rep, 3) wait till your profile is disabled or suspended and request reinstatement. (These reinstatement requests are reviewed by more experienced people and all of mine have gone through when video was rejected)
