A few months ago, I submitted a paper to the top journal in my field. I just received a major revision decision. There was an enormous amount of comments from the four reviewers on many different aspects but all of them specifically doubt if the proposed system advances the state of the art or if it is useful among other things. In reality, It is a novel and interesting idea/concept but it does not make the numbers (performance) better as the reviewers suggested.
The associate editor said that they will consider publication only if they received convincing responses but the wording indicates they doubt that I will be able to do. I could attempt to address the comments but I feel like my chances are close to zero given the number of comments and the tone of the AE.
As our group recently submitted another paper that was rejected by the same AE, I feel like the AE did not just outright reject this one because they just rejected the one before. Hence, a major revision.
I understand that the consensus in the community in the case of revisions is that the AE sees value in the paper but that does seem to be the case here from my understanding.
My question: with the information above, would it be a good idea to skip the major revision and submit to another Journal? My concern here is time as it will likely take three more months to get a high likely reject.
Also, how likely is it for papers to get rejected after major revisions?