My advisor shared some insight with me that some of the faculty who sit on admissions committees can be fickle and traditionalists and/or elitists, regardless of where they received their Ph.D. from or what school they're now at. At the heart of what my advisor was saying, is that quite often, working in one field without taking a breath now and then generates a myopic worldview, and sometimes causes faculty members to forget how difficult the journey going into, or even out of, academia can be. Sometimes, it goes as far as them taking their tenure track positions for granted. Even the nicest of POIs can be affected by this.
What I took away from this is that no matter how perfect of an application we submit, it will always be, although it really shouldn't, entirely subjective to the eyes and ears of those reading and grading our applications. More often than not, we're left beating ourselves up over things entirely out of our control. Yes, we can check grammar and punctuation, finely tune the angle from which we answer their prompts, and to a certain extent, up our GRE scores. But, at the end of the application cycle, a lot of us have been subjected to a sort of indescribable hell that was totally out of our control, regardless of whether or not we were admitted anywhere.
