Thanks, but I have accepted another offer

I see people that truly understand their market value, have data backing it up, they are professional (I always tell people how I appreciate the time / offer, and I'm polite to recruiters), demanding about information (I have little tolerance for ambiguity in compensation, define everything, this is how I pay the mortgage and save for retirement / my kids college).

Some managers think that is spoiled (not that you are necessarily saying that), but this is a business transaction, I ask for market and turn it down if it's not that, or if the compensation is ambiguous.

Then I see those that don't know their value and just sort of take whatever because they don't like interviewing / negotiating. I don't see many of those at the high end.

The third group are who you are talking about, total babies. They complain about recruiters, or how much everyone wants them, place crazy demands on companies (I worked with a guy who literally had a rider like Van Halen in his LinkedIn profile, he ended up being a total prima donna who got fired because everyone hated him). Most people in this third group think they are in the first, and they aren't worth recruiting, even if they are strong technically.

Sometimes people believe this means startups / small companies can't compete, but the issue is, startups / small companies really aren't offering any sort of market comp, they don't give enough equity to employees to make the risk worth your while. You don't necessarily need to pay me what AmaGoogFaceSoft do, but you need to give me a significant chunk of equity and give me enough visibility into how that is cut up (preferences etc.) in the company for me to value it, otherwise its worth 0, even if I believe that the company will be successful. If you can't trust me enough with that sort of transparency, then it's not gonna work out. With a huge public company, I know what my stock is worth roughly.

How will you know if the VP of Engineering is a borderline raving lunatic who treats his staff like garbage until you've had the opportunity to witness their behavior first hand? How will you know if your manager likes to micromanage their reports, making your day job a living hell, until you actually work underneath of them? How do you know beforehand if there are toxic individuals, that may be your co-workers or others that you need to work closely with, who create negative work and a poor working environment? How will you know beforehand if any of these things will be addressed if they are present? What about places with ridiculous office politics and bureaucracy? For instance, it can take years to find out nepotism runs rampant through different layers or departments in a company.

The best you can do is word of mouth and things like GlassDoor. But, word of mouth requires access to people who have worked or currently work at that place, and you have to take those things with a grain of salt, especially coming from former employees. Even if you do have access to these things, it's been my experience that these things only get you approximately close to some truth.

It's a very big gamble and, having lived through some of the above scenarios, I completely understand why people optimize this problem for the highest pay.

I agree that people miss appointments etc, but this is again distraction from bigger picture, where you would focus on your skills and what you really want to do. And especially how you want to do it, process is also important.