I feel for your experience. When I applied last year, I thought the same thing, and the results from my class proved the system’s shortcomings:
Our valedictorian (99.37 avg) got denied from NHS on the basis that he didn’t volunteer enough. He had amassed at least 250 hours volunteering on our county’s Youth Court, but I guess he put it in the EC part of the app so he only had Key Club for the volunteering section.
The icing on the cake for him was that some students who had stolen a Trig test less than a year before applying got in. So much for the honor in National Honor Society.