> there is no real excuse for having an interview so generic that someone can game it in this manner unless you're so large that you can afford the odd charlatan.

I'm also part of a small start-up (as an employee), and I can certainly vouch for that. I for one put a very high emphasis on the personal/professional projects the guy/dudette in front of me has been involved in, on how best s/he can explain them to me, on how passionate the person seems when explaining all this (and no, I'm not talking about the enthusiastic approach that can be easily faked, I just think that when you're a programmer you can feel what the other programmer in front of you is very interested in).

Also, this mania a lot of interviewers have with the interviewees "always ticking the right boxes and giving the correct answers" sort of scares me. It's probably because I work in a start-up, but I can assure everyone that at least half of the time we ourselves don't know the answers (assuming that we even know the correct questions), and there are lots of times when we seem to be knowing in what direction we're going but truly speaking we don't.