We really don't know how we'll rank you until you interview--so you may well end up shining brighter than people who got prioritized based on their paperwork.
Not necessarily. The bottleneck is the number of interview slots. Thus, likelihood of the applicant being interested in a program is a factor that is weighed when deciding whom to interview (i.e. why interview somebody who is going to rank me low). How well an applicant likes me does not have a great effect on ranking of people. It has more to do with how we liked the applicant.