Weird changes to status of paper Last november I submitted a paper to a journal. I have been tracking the status of the review rather regularly (quite obsessively actually) and I have noticed that 3 weeks ago it went from awaiting AE decision back to reviewer assignment. After a couple of days, it went to reviewer selection. Now, it has gone back to reviewer assignment yet again.

I find this quite curious and if anyone has any idea what could be going on, please share it here! I suspect there's a conflict of opinion initially and then the third reviewer rejected reviewing so now they are back to finding a third reviewer? Any help is appreciated.
Nobody except the editor in charge of the paper can possibly know. We can all -- and you can -- speculate what the editor may have been doing, but none of us will actually know. If you must know what is going on, write to the editor. If you are only curious but do not need to know, then practice patience and wait for the outcome.