The reviewers were originally divergent in their opinions of this paper, but came to some agreements in discussion. It was agreed that the paper provides an interesting contribution for neuroscience by extending the previous work of Seung et al. (1997) to more biologically realistic networks, but the actual theoretical insights beyond that original paper are not large. In the end, an "accept" decision was reached, but it was agreed that the authors should better clarify the strong links to the Seung paper and be more cautious in their claims of "detailed" or "tight" balance in cortical networks.