I agree, most don't. And I believe even larger part of recruiters don't understand either. You can make a choice but C is extracting a share from the transaction. And if not in your particular case, they are doing so in the large share of recruiting.

The recruiter needs to understand a different market than an engineer.

Recruiters also don't come into play when you can easily fill the position. The harder it becomes the more relevant a good recruiter becomes.

Are there plenty of bad ones? Definitely. But that's true for almost every profession.

This is what I'm getting at: It's an easy market for the domain expert to be great at. How hard can it be? With the added criticism that I see little value in less competent people doing it.

I just don't think deep domain expertise makes you a better recruiter. You need to have deep domain expertise in recruiting with all its facets. Then, you need a working knowledge of the domain you are recruiting for.

Having a little experience coding is definitely a good thing if you are recruting software engineers. However, you don't need to be able to build a distributed system using AWS.

A good recruiter only recruits for a specific horizontal or vertical niche and knows enough about that domain to talk.

One way to extract value from that chain for an engineer would be, to offer tech consulting/teaching to recruiters.