Somehow, I have not made myself clear.
We are not discussing reasonable people. The types of people in question here, are those who in the end, point a finger at the subjectivity of the admissions process, URM advantage/ORM disadvantage, among other things, as the reason why they did not get into medical school, as opposed to more "There were probabably 15 other applicants at each medical school I applied to just like me, and the school could only take one such applicant out of our group."
I didn't think I would get accepted this year - I still applied anyway. There are no guarantees in life sir. You put your best foot-forward and hope that your merits will be recognized. Why did I feel a need for my OP? Because SDN is littered with such applicants who believe they DESERVE to go to medical school, whether or not such a consensus exists among ADCOMS.
Further, consider one of the other points I made in my OP. Imagine an applicant with a 4.0 and a 39 MCAT, and assume they have some of the cookie cutter EC's. Come May 15th, this applicant has only been accepted to one medical school, lets say a middle-tier program like Loyola or SUNY Buffalo. They received waitlists at 7 of the top 25 schools they interviewed at, and no other acceptances. Now, given the fiercely competitive nature of admissions, this could be seen as an anomaly - the applicant has obviously proven themselves academically and their application made a big enough splash at a number of schools to warrant several interviews. This person is now ANNOYED that they have only been accepted to Loyola, as opposed to say Columbia University or Baylor College of Medicine. I would say this person has a rather inflated ego - they have the opportunity to become a physician - the opportunity to earn an MD in the United States. Just because this person was able to put together a strong application, does that mean they absolutely DESERVE to go to one of these top 25 schools? Their merits have been recognized at a school they chose to apply to. There was some other thread here on SDN where someone had been accepted to Boston University, but didn't think it was "prestigious enough" or highly ranked enough to matriculate this year, and were contemplating withdrawing their application and re-applying to medical school in a subsequent cycle. Really?!?! Accepted to Boston University, and you're going to come out and say "I deserve better than this."? This is the kind of mentality among applicants that I am talking about.
I'm not talking about the "Man, I'm really, REALLY dissapointed I didn't get accepted this year. I put in the work and I really thought this was the year it would happen for me, getting into medical school." but instead the "I CANT BELIEVE I DIDN'T GET IN. I HAVE THE SOLID GRADES AND THE MCAT AND I'VE SACRIFICED WAY MORE THAN MOST APPLICANTS PROBABLY HAVE SACRIFICED." In reality, in the grand scheme of things, when it comes to these kinds of intangibles, you can't know how you stack up against to the others. Certainly if you are a single mother who worked part time and went to college full time while raising a child and pulled off a 3.7 and a 36 MCAT, chances are there are few others in a given application cycle who can provide that same story. But what about the Bosnian immigrant who escaped genocide in his rural village and made it to the U.S. in search of a more promising life, and in doing so earned a 3.9 GPA in a hard major at some no-name university but still rocked their MCAT, all the while being financially self-sustaining? Could you rank one of these people over the other? Probably not, but you can say that these individuals have overcome odds that few other applicants in a given year probably did. Yet those other applicants might not know about these kinds of individuals applying to medical school in the same year as them, so who are these other generic applicants to say that they've sacrificed more than anyone else? Who are they to say that other people haven't overcome the same kinds of adversity? This is what I am talking about, and these are the kinds of applicants I am talking about when I speak of this sense of self-acclaim and entitlement.
