Since you mentioned Indeed, I thought I'd mention I had a similar sort of "resume black hole" experience. For a long time, I wasn't really thinking and just applied through those job board sites, directly from the posting. Later, I started using those sites just to research companies, and then go to the company site and apply there, and all of sudden I get five responses in a week. If there's no company listed, a lot of times you can google portions of the job description and it leads to a real company. My resume formatting would often be messed up by the job board sites, so it probably went straight to the garbage. There's really no reason to go through a recruiter if you can avoid it.
I've been doing that whenever possible. I even have my wife helping! It does work for some of the posts where the actual employer's name is listed, but for recruiter-obfuscated posts, it's much more difficult. Sometimes we are able to reverse-engineer the original company using location and other information, though. It's still a draining experience.
