Reading HN will give you a skewed perspective. This site is literally and by design the HQ for YC applicants, alumni and fellow travellers. A lot of those fellow travellers worship pg.
Read the comments whenever a new essay is posted. Lots of /r/cringe material.
Being in YC definitely has its advantages, it will - all other things being equal - give a stamp of approval to a start-up that will translate into easier funding, more press coverage and more 'buzz'. Those are real advantages when it comes to competition.
Right now, planetwide in my opinion there is no other single advantage as large as YC for as little dilution. If you can spare the time for an application when you're seriously (that's the bit that many people seem to overlook) working on a startup then applying to YC is an absolute no-brainer.
This has 0 to do with pg worship. And being part of the YC alumni network is a benefit all by itself.
In fact I would say that any entrepreneur / startup Network will far exceed in returned value the costs of setting up. For example a mailing list and regular meet at the Starbucks nearest londons silicon roundabout would mean more to introduce new startups into the area than any government program
There may already be one
I'm sure somebody somewhere is writing breathless blog posts about how to get into Stanford.
It's not unlike how we often fascinate about the gear we need to embark on a trip while we forget the hard/interesting part is the journey itself.
I'm not saying YC is without value, I think for certain people it's fantastic. Not everyone knows how to build a business out of the box. But the obsession with certain types of getting into YC is purely so they can be in the club and get rich and get onto TechCrunch.