I am sure this is true, but how many product advisers do you know?
When I look at that last batch of acceptees... I am very surprised at some who made the cut. I'm not sold on YC's judgement. I think they may hit a few home runs just due to taking a lot of swings rather than due to an ability to identify the good pitches, and get lucky that a couple hundred fair pitches are proffered every time. Which leads into the next point...
> Pg and co get so many applications and have so little time to read them that you should expect that the YC partners don’t have any idea what you do
...Which means you're giving ownership to people who don't care enough about what you do in particular to spend time on it; this is a big mismatch if you've spent a lot of time on your project, so their approach is more aligned with people who come in with ideas sans code. They have dozens of other start-ups to deal with, not to mention all the time some of them spend on this site.
So the main value in YC seems to be demo day -- getting a stage to present to a large number of moneyed interests at once, plus the news coverage, so you either get the real investment dollars you need or get acquired.
All the information you get is pretty much replaceable -- you can find it other places -- but YC takes the write-protect tab off the floppy so instead of just you being stuck in read-only mode you can write out information that is seen by people you want to see it.
At least that's what it appears their primary value is to me.