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Having a quirky personality does indicate a tendency to think differently.
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no, not really. If you play the kazoo and wear rainbow suspenders, you could be quite a bit less creative then the serious guy wearing khaki panse every day. If these people think differently, it should come across through their recs. If you make having a quirky personality a boost for admission, people will figure it out and you'll have a flood of boring people who wear rainbow suspenders and their hair like Einstein in order to try to get admitted.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a person getting a "B" would get better recs than the guy getting A+s unless there was some extreme difference in the level of difficulty of the high schools involved. So if person A has worse grades AND worse recs than person B, it is very unlikely that you choose person B over A. It's very unlikely that someone could do something that would offset this, because in reality there are very few people who actually are at the level to do something really outstanding outside of class in research...Even most Intel Finalist people generally just do some research project that their mentor suggested. Also, it's probably even rarer that someone finds a new subatomic particle but can't get an "A" in basic physics or calculus. Besides, it is extremely difficult to be creative if you haven't even mastered the basic rules of a scientific or mathematical field.
The only reason I suggested automatic admission for USAMO qualifiers is because only 100 people in the country qualify and because the questions are extremely hard on the AIME. The guys I knew that qualified for the USAMO were uniformly brilliant and went on to do great things. Even though you can learn contest math, it seems nearly impossible to do at that level without a great deal of problem-solving ability. I only threw in that caveat about GPA so that people that are really good at math but totally lazy wouldn't get in.
With the issue of grades, what is wrong with taking people that do things the way they were meant to be done. With the exception of english, which can be subjective to writing style, if you know what you are talking about in math and science you should be able to get an "A". Especially when you are talking about such a basic level of math and science like high school classes.
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