I am also going through similar problems. I am in the 6th year of my PhD program in applied maths but in climate science dept. I have already published one first author paper and co-author of another paper in reputed international journals. Currently working on my next first author paper. I have 5 members in my advisory committee, apart from my supervisor and co-supervisor, other committee members (they are from different dept, one from biology and another from climate science) have no idea about the nature of my work. I completed writing my thesis and submitted to the committee 8 months back. I got lots of comments and I tried to incorporate them to the best of my ability and merits of comments. My supervisors are ok to send it to the external examiner but two of my committee members are still not ok with that.

One committee members told me he expect 3-5 first author peer reviewed papers from a PhD. In his field it may be common (I have read many of his papers, he just analyse the observation data at different locations, find the trend and report it ). My research is more of theoretical (method development and then apply to some toy models). I tried to put my published paper with minor editorial modification but still he wanted me to change the figure format and many such things. I read some his papers and found that he himself didn't follow his comments on his papers. But I don't know if it appropriate to bring that in to his notice.

Other committee members is a grammar nazi. I improved the language of my whole thesis with the help of a person from the english dept. (my first language is not english). He made me change all passive voice to the active voice, and asked me not to use first person plural...I incorporated most of his comments but still he is not happy.

Both the committee members didn't give any comments on the methods I developed but only on the technical aspects. My supervisors agreed to talk to them but told me they can't do anything if the other two committee are still not happy. The maximum time to complete the PhD is 7 years and currently i don't have any funding. I am worried what to do? Should I quit PhD or ask them to consider my thesis for master's degree and get out (I don't know if it is possible in my university)?