They either ask for a dev and then take it back (half of the time, according to Phil above), or my guess is they think I'm too expensive (and yet, I'm still priced less than the average that you see for a senior front-end/rails developer). The proposals I submit are highly targeted - what they need is exactly what I can provide. And yet only 1 proposal has lead to a statement of work, and they rejected it.

Whereas a serious amount of networking locally yielded me a 10% pay increase and a 6 month contract.

I think this is why you get all of this advice saying that these kinds of sites are a race to the bottom and not worth investing too much time into.