On the other hand, when I applied to TripleByte, their feedback to me was "we think your skills are fine, but we want somebody who can perform well in an interview". Which is exactly the opposite of the value you're attributing to them here.

Quoting them, for reference:

> We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.

> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview.