Good god. We don't deliberately play good cops and bad cops to push people's buttons. We wouldn't have the energy to do that all day long for 3 days. We just have a lot of questions to ask and only 10 minutes to do it in, and we have to switch context completely every 15 minutes. This means there's a lot of randomness in the questions. You get easy ones mixed randomly with ones that seem very critical, but it's not deliberate.
I find it sad in a way that although you've put a really good thing together, it's started to become the goal for some people, instead of just one of many ways to enable them to reach what should be their actual goal.
Actually that is a problem. We started to notice about two years ago that we were getting applications from people who seemed mainly to want YC on their resumes. We try to filter those out, but we still get fooled occasionally.
I've edited the post to include this comment (for completeness), but it felt like a good cop/bad cop situation, even if it weren't deliberate. Lots of teams said the same thing. It was probably all in our mind, but it's something that will be in the minds of future interviewees as well (people really build it up for themselves).
In stressful situations, just being asked probing questions by someone you don't know can feel like an act of aggression, even if it's not meant to be. They can sound like a challenge to your authority on your subject matter; I could see how you would feel like it was a good cop / bad cop scenario (which I really doubt it was).
