You're certainly right that the submission stream here includes a lot of gems that get overlooked, and that the second-chance pool is a workaround for that—and far from a complete solution. But I think you're overinterpreting the reasons for this ("not about FAANG", "wrong time zone", "SV slacking off", etc.) - one could come up with all sorts of possible such reasons and without data they're all basically just-so stories.
In the absence of specific evidence about specific factors, the simplest explanation is that it's just the way the medium works. By "the medium" I mean the large open internet forum, which HN is an instance of. Stuff routinely gets overlooked. To do something about this, we need countervailing mechanisms. The second-chance pool is the most successful one we've tried so far. I still want to extend the review process to the community at large, and I'm still not sure how quite to do that.
