Do author name(s) dominate the content of the paper?
In what you have written, you are confusing together two things:


Is the author known to the reviewers? (e.g., "names with a good track record")
Is the paper well written? (e.g., "English is poor")


While some sub-fields may have "cliques" that exclude people who are not part of them, most reputable scientific publications have a basically honest review process.  Reviewers are human, and so even honest reviewers will tend to look more favorably on a person whose work they already respect---and thus many publication venues have double-blind review to try to eliminate this possibility.

If you haven't published in a well-reputed journal before, however, there's a good chance that your paper will not be well-written. Writing scientific papers is a skill, and that skill takes practice. Moreover, writing well is often much harder if you aren't writing in your primary language.  And even if you write well in general, writing effectively to a particular scientific community requires being conversant with the current state of that community, in order to understand how readers (and reviewers) are likely to think about what you write.

Thus, I would strongly agree with your colleagues that it is extremely useful to get an expert to look at your paper.  I would strongly disagree that means that expert should become an author---merely reading and commenting on a draft is definitely not sufficient for authorship.

If the expert finds problems in what you have written and is interested to become involved, however, it might be very good to begin a collaboration in which they work with you to refine your work and connect it better to the community of interest. In that case, the expert would indeed become a co-author: not because their name is valuable, but because their expertise has helped to improve the paper into something much stronger than it was before.