I completely agree with your analysis. That said, this comment and your blog post seem to have avoided (probably unintentionally!) the two questions that seem to me to be most salient.

1. If you ranked the startups in attendance, do you think a 50th percentile startup would have gotten something useful out of Disrupt? A 90th percentile startup? (If so, in softer benefits like pulling together as a team or in something measurable?)

2. Do you think your traffic numbers for Trello would have looked substantially different on launch day without Disrupt? In 6 months?

In the first case, I wonder if there really are unfunded, 90th percentile tech startups that represent some sort of Cinderella story that just need the spotlight to get funding and attention. In your case, I wonder if 6 minutes on stage compares to a decade of organic SEO and trust (via your blog), running the most popular programming Q&A site, and cross-promotion opportunities from FogBugz, Kiln, Copilot, and others.