I am very very impressed by your posts over a year ago, and by your recent achievements - as someone who hustled his way from redundant to twice my original salary in a similar time I sympathise with the effort.

I would say that perhaps both of you are missing one important component - specialisation. giving off the right signals for a particular niche enables you to credibly sell yourself in that niche (be it email-life cycle products or Angularjs coding)

I read your post from a year ago - you mentioned three interviews, Ruby, ObjC and JS. I would guess that today you would not dream of going to the first two - simply because your strengths lie in JS.

You have specialised - and as such become more valuable. But you could have specialised in many things other than language and still gotten good jobs. A specialist commands more money, due to scarcity and percieved increase in the probability of success.

However I still think patio11 is also right - of two equally qualified specialists, one that is better at marketing and promotion and negotiation is going to do drastically better.

But no matter how good Ramit Sethi is on negotiation, if he goes for a C++ job he is not going to beat out a specialist even if the specialist just says yes to the first offer.

(Little assumption there about Ramit's C++ skillz)