A reviewer said our related work reads like a list rather than an analysis. I have two openings — which one?

The reviewer's complaint is not about coverage but about the absence of an organizing argument. Option A directly answers that need by framing prior work as a developmental narrative—retrieval, prompting, and fine-tuning as successive stages, each solving a limitation of the previous one. That causal progression gives every citation a functional role (motivation, limitation, solution), explains how approaches relate to and supersede one another, and makes the section analytical rather than enumerative. It also works regardless of whether the paper contributes a new method or an evaluation. Option B is more polished than a plain list and rightly identifies a gap—that approaches are rarely compared on the same task—but its first move still frames prior work as a flat taxonomy of 'several angles,' and its analytical payoff depends on a single evaluation-gap claim that only fits a head-to-head comparison paper; otherwise it misdirects and risks reverting to bucket-by-bucket listing. The gap in B is valuable and could be integrated later, but as an opening thesis A better converts related work from a list into an analysis.