I wonder what sparkled this? The lack of good ideas in submitted applications or you guys just wanted to be more involved, i.e. wanted to see your own vision of the future materialize in front of you?

I also wonder what happened to idea #2 on this list: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Seemed like pikluk.com applied to solve precisely that (even before the list was published) but we got rejected, then exhausted our savings, burned out and just quietly returned to our day jobs, yet no YC-funded solution emerged up to date. Being rejected is one thing, but getting "Your idea is great, but we'll wait for someone with a better pedigree to work on it" message hurts much more.