first the rejection for prior art is done quickly in the first exam of uspto without look at the details. the more important comes after the rejection, discussions and clarifications in details can change the rejection, it happens very often. so we have simply to wait for the final result, it is impossible to say with certainty if an invention has or not the prior art based only on the rejection of the first uspto exam. That is why it is long because inventors has to show to uspto why their invention has prior art. The first exam is just a little step, the following step is much much more important but for the moment we cant know what are the discussions between uspto and epgl so wait for the final results before to say something.