Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Two things I can tell you: (a) Schools tend to be self-selecting; (b) The admission office decisions seem not necessarily reflect your interview impression.
Just because a kid does not like Harkness Table does not mean he is not intellectually curious or any less passionate. Some of the smartest people are reticent. I would not think Dirac (yes, of Dirac equation) would have liked Harkness at all! It is crucial to interpret what AO said at face value: Everyone learns differently. The fact that the AO took effort to make sure we understand this point impressed us a lot, and he was not hurt at all. He ended up at a school that truly loved him, and he is so happy there that he cannot think of anywhere else now. We still joke these days his greatest luck was in being rejected by all those “famous” schools, which pretty much pre-empted all bad decisions he could have made. Many types of luck come disguised as misfortune.
My second point is related to my earlier one: One Interview experience is not representative of the school as a whole. In fact, you might be surprised to receive a thick envelop from the very schools that you felt ignored during your interviews. So many things are at play here. The interviewer might have been intentionally rude to throw you off-balance, to see how you react. Super important ability this is: poise under stress. (I know, I am trying hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.) Or the admissions committee may discount reports by particular interviewers whose evaluations consistently lack due care or thoughtfulness. (So, as long as you fared better than the rest of the interviewees for that particular interviewer, your evaluation report will still emerge at the top.) Important thing to know is that it is not “me against them,” that the school is not a uniform body but consists of so many conflicting views and personalities (which means, on the flipside, even if you aced an interview, it means you have secured only one voice for you in the deliveration room). So I am afraid you may not be so lucky like my kid was on M10: you may be presented with some very tough decisions to make. Sorry.
These “brand-name” boarding schools always say “Admission is not a right but a previlege.” But they’d be wise to know what others are doing in distributing the “previlege.” For one hyper-competitive private day school, I was surprised to find a department head come out wearing the hat of an interviewer, spending a full hour to grill every detail of the most challenging project an applicant did. It seemed to me indicative of how serious they were about the selection process, how much they valued “excellence.”