But I'm not sure it's that developers are being given gold and don't recognize it. It's that developers are being given mud and recognize it, while most other people are being given shit instead.

I'd rather be handed a pile of mud than a pile of shit, but it's not hard to feel that there must be some alternative that's better than either.

(Maybe there isn't, though. Matching candidates to jobs is just hard, I think; everyone's incentives are misaligned, performance is difficult to predict, it's amazingly difficult to get past your initial snap judgements or even to realise that you're failing to do so, etc.)