Thanks for your opinion, but I’m not quite sure what you are disagreeing on.
I’m disagreeing with what extent of the problem is age-gap related, and what extent is from other causes.
Once faced with the magnitude of the age gap issue, everything else pales (especially considering that, as we agree upon, most boys are married early in their “dating career”).
Hence, while I can relate to your frustration with your experience with pushy shadchanim, I can’t agree that it’s a significant part of the problem.
Similarly, I can also relate to the frustration of a family with a girl who doesn’t seem to get much interest because of a financial issue or something similar, but I can’t attribute the overall shidduch disparity to financial issues (although b’derech hateva, it very well might contribute to the problem for specific families).
I also disagree that all efforts are futile since the boy will anyway go out with whomever he wants. I believe the NASI initiative began with monetary incentives to shadchanim. Hence, faced with more choices of the more mature girls, the boys would be more likely to go out with one. Anecdotally, the stigma of a boy marrying a girl the same age or even older than him seems to have been drastically reduced, and some shadchanimm, at this point only motivated by altruism, do try to redt the older girls first.