[veyron]

There's a ton of adverse selection issues, and I suspect a large part of it is due to the price point. People and startups tend to want to pay a very small amount of money for design and code, and as a result the best people will opt to go for higher paying gigs. And if you want to pay a lot, many jedi knights have become disillusioned and avoid working with you in case you decide to flake at the last moment. And god forbid paying upfront: you don't know what you will get.

There is also the strange model of communication. Some places side with the developer and other places side with the sponsor (in the sponsor case, they present the spec and if the developer doesn't perfectly match the spec they won't get paid)

It's really ironic to see this and other similar posts recently, given that I'm about to launch a site to address the stated issue: http://codewren.ch

But more generally, the best option is to work with a friend or a friend of friend.