What didn't work with the Fellowship, exactly? In light of the dissolution, how did the winners of the Apply HN competition (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627) work with the most recent Fellowship class?
TBD how this plays out, but it'll be interesting to watch.
Do you account for the effects you have on the rest of the community when calculating your impact?
For example, I suspect YC is strongly responsible for the rise of "low amounts of equity without control for a small amount of funding" seed rounds, and for the existence of accelerators, in both cases globally.
The Fellowship model of investing tiny amounts - like "sparks", lighting a fire - into an enormous number of teams with as little friction as possible was the next logical step and I was looking forward to Fellowship copies sprouting all over the world.
Unfortunately by effectively ending the program you might be sending a signal to global investors not to try it, that YC Core is the deal size floor that works...