A few days later I got a 2-minute rejection call, in which the recruiter said simply that the Skype interviewer did not feel that my technical skills were good

A few days later I got a 2-minute rejection call, in which the recruiter said simply that the Skype interviewer did not feel that my technical skills were good enough. So they're being fair and giving it to the candidate straight. Which is actually quite laudable (considering how many companies never go anywhere close to providing meaningful feedback after interviews). The Skype interview was all talk and involved no coding whatsoever--how can the interviewer gauge my technical skills with such an interview? Actually you can gauge quite a lot about someone without delving into code at all. In fact, minute-for-minute it's often vastly more effective. So for these purposes, that was probably an excellent question to ask. I had 5 other evaluative interviews that were ALL stated to have been "very positive," after multiple rounds. OTOH this (along all the other back-and-forth) is pretty clear indication that the recruiters were lying to you at that particular stage. Obviously the feedback wasn't "very positive", more likely it was "mixed" -- but the recruiters, being recruiters, felt they had to lie to you to keep you in the funnel. Otherwise they wouldn't, you know, make their numbers. Their reputation for having tough interview problems is totally overrated at this point. Sounds like they've wisened up, and realized that asking gratuitously "tough" (read: hit-or-miss) technical questions just isn't very useful as a filtering technique.