@calmom Obviously, the adcom did everything right in your DD case and system worked for you.
But for many people numbers are just fact of life. Even if 1500 kids with perfect essays and perfect everything else they cannot squeeze into 150 slots. In practice adcoms probably don’t distinguish 35s vs 36s or 1600 vs 1560, which means the number is more like 15000 for 150. That just means that acceptance/rejection is more due to luck than lack of perfection for these 36/4.0 awards kids. I don’t want to get into specifics about kids I know, but CC has plenty:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1876770-what-did-i-do-wrong-p1.html
Can you honestly say this kid has major flaws, like poor writing ability, personality issues and etc? He, just like thousands of others tried to squeeze in those limited slots and got unlucky.
To OP’s question I think a lot of hookless kids and their parents are stressed out because they believe there are always more things they can do, like better EC, essays or more difficult courses. But in reality its a number’s game. Even if you are perfect you can still be very unlucky. And its simply not these kids fault.