You're kind of famous and people aren't going to want to say no to you but at the same time probably fail to execute. There's zero hesitation when it comes to shooting down small fries from my experience (I'm an employee at my 3rd ycombinator startup now). I remember Airbnb when it was tiny, back in 2009/2010, they were small like the rest of us once.
You might be surprised on that. I got many of the same style of rejections you did. I got very few clear-cut "No"s and lots of "We like what you're doing and it makes sense, but we need a bit more time." Which is the most frustrating form of "No", as I suspect you know.
My guess as to what made us different than Airbnb circa 2008--maybe some of these apply to you, too:
1) Founder with previous exit/acquisition in the tech space
2) Product had some traction (paying customers, including a F500 company)
3) Product was in a domain that most VC's/angels didn't have experience with (in my case, software designed for marketing teams) -- some were nice enough to outright reject us based on the fact that they had never been in marketing; the people who had previously been in marketing almost immediately saw the need and said "YES" right away; many of them saw that we had traction but felt like they needed to understand the market better to see what we were seeing, so to speak.
