But your program interviewed these people in spite of only having the COMLEX and these other potentially red flags (weak LORs, failures, etc.).
I think we interview basically everybody that come from a few schools geographically near us. That includes a DO program and a very uncompetitive allopathic program. In the past six matches (the ones of people I know), we've only had one person from the allopathic school and no people from the DO school match here.
Then again, if their career interest is "Umm, I haven't really thought about it," then maybe the major academic center isn't for them anyway.
It doesn't really matter whether my observation has any generalizability or not. What matters is that clearly in this thread there are plenty of folks, allopath and osteopath alike, who have said your best bet is to take the USMLE if you want the option of doing an allopathic residency. A little bit more cash and another day of a test is relatively speaking a pretty tiny hoop to jump through. You've already studied for the COMLEX. I'm sure there are plenty of programs who won't care either way. But if you're a second year medical student, you don't necessarily have any clue what you're going to want to do with yourself. Maybe you'll still want to be a psychiatrist after a year of doing clinical work, but maybe you won't. Maybe you want to go to a certain kind of program now, but maybe in a year you're going to want something very different. My brother-in-law killed himself while I was on my M3 psych rotation. The next day after coming back from the funeral I had to interview an inpatient with the almost identical psychopathology that he had and who looked a lot like him. I threw up after rounds. Don't you think that could have made my decision to go into psychiatry take a different route? I wasn't planning on him overdosing while psychotic, but he did.
If an extra few hundred bucks and one more day of your life at the end of your second year has any significant chance, for better or worse, of making a difference in whether you live in city X in specialty Y for 4 years and maybe a lot longer, then there's probably not a great reason not to do it other than the fact that you don't want to. And if that's the only thing you've had to do in the last 6-8 years of your life you've had to do that you didn't want to do, you've had a more blessed route than the rest of us.
Psychiatry is still an applicant's market. Other than maybe MGH, Columbia, Cornell, UCSF, Stanford, UCLA, even the other top good programs wind up interviewing some pretty weak applicants, because it's not easy to fill a large psychiatry class top to bottom with really good people, and you'd rather have somebody underwhelming but competent match than nobody at all. And just because you get an interview doesn't mean you have just as good a chance of matching as everybody else who got an interview. That's simply a myth.
I know I say things that aren't popular, but I don't think it makes sense for people to keep telling each other that so many things don't matter when they really can. People don't like hearing that your board scores, medical school, research, having your life together, etc. can matter. None of these things are ultimately deterministic, and your general story and what you want to do with your life matter and showing that you will be a safe, competent physician matter much more than any one of those things. But that doesn't mean they can't matter in a lot of situations, and it's reckless to blow these things off flippantly.