Rejected MICCAI paper: workshop -> journal/conference or directly journal/conference [R]

Premise: this work is my first year PhD, and I dropped out for personal reasons. I still want to do research but independently. I have tried to submit my explainability paper to MICCAI. Sadly, for doubtful/good reasons, it got rejected. Among the reviewers, one explicitly suggested to make it stronger and that the work is "novel". I was wondering if a good strategy would be to work on it more (maybe improving also the time it take