That’s true, and I agree with you completely re the importance of fit, but by “Ivies” I meant only HYP (but probably should have included Columbia). Princeton made a valiant effort to stanch grade inflation, but has explicitly reversed course. And although it was for a time more difficult to get an “A” at Princeton, Princeton was plagued by/reveled in its reputation as the country club of the Big Three–less intellectually and academically serious, more socially oriented (even in the modern era, the gap between the number of Jewish students at Princeton compared to Harvard and Yale was very wide).
For what it’s worth, a recent, peer-reviewed sociological study reveals that Harvard and Stanford undergraduates–correctly or not–still hold to the stereotypical view of Princeton: “the feature of Princeton’s that students mentioned most often, and most negatively, was its reputation for being a 'country club…Harvard and Stanford students emphasized that Princeton could not be as excellent as their schools because it emphasized existing social orders…most students used Princeton as a negative example compared with their own campus’s greater diversity, which is a valuable feature of elite cosmopolitanism.” (Amy J. Binder and Andrea R. Abel, “Symbolically Maintained Inequality: How Harvard and Stanford Students Construct Boundaries Among Elite Universities,” Sociology of Education, Vol. 19, Issue 1, 2019, p. 13, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040718821073).