Employment is a relationship. If you can't be bothered to treat me as a human being when I apply, how do I know you will dutifully treat me as a human being when I'm working for you?

Do you normally fill out a 1 hour questionnaire with bizarre drop outs for your first dates? Don't accept the power imbalance that is the status quo.

That's a complete straw man. TFA we're discussing is about a 5 minute application process. Five. Freaking. Minutes.

If you can't fill out a 5 minute form to get a job, that's a problem.

If their recruiter is "super impressed with my resume" and thinks I'd make great things happen at ${COMPANY}, then why can't they enter my experience into their proprietary system?

I mean, they were so confident in their initial email to me. Were they not actually as amazed as they stated?

Most job applications are not five minute processes, even for day laborers. Source: me, doing payroll for thousands of staffing companies.

If the 5 minute form got me a job, sure. But it's a 5 minute form to chuck a bunch of my personal information into a black hole where, most likely, I'll never hear anything, or will get a form letter back in two weeks telling me they're not interested in me for the role I already have at a different company.

So really, as OP put, it's 20-50 5-minute forms that are all exactly the same, so that you might get a single interview. Or you just know someone who works there and skip the whole thing because woo nepotism.

Aren't the most valuable employees the ones that hate mundane and repetitive tasks, who find a means to make their work easier? A job is of little value if the man performing it has no interest in improving it.

If I pay a man to move boxes from here to there, should I fault him for asking where the pallet jack is? Certainly not! When he was done with that, I had other things which he could be doing for me instead. I'd rather pay one man handsomely, than two adequately. A man who doesn't have a disdain for the inefficiency of the thing is the one I aim to replace.

Because I passed through the education system? Because I managed to hold other jobs previously?

Hopefully you were joking, but it does seem like over and over you're required to go to the trouble of running little experiments on claims for which there already exist ample evidence in well-documented parts of my life.