I agree with everything you have said. A hiring manager has every right to be as choosy as he or she chooses. I've read plenty of blogs that talk about how rigorous the hiring process is at company x, how good you have to be to get hired, and how they pass on candidates that would probably be good employees because the damage of a false positive is so much higher than a false negative. All a-ok in my book.

The part that irritates me is when these companies start talking about the serious problem of a shortage of developers. I feel that if you want to throw out many people who would have been good employees, you should accept the consequences - that hiring will be very hard and you will face a shortage of your own making.