DY: ubiquitin’s point about musical chairs actually makes a lot of sense- the fact is that the shidduch “crisis” (I hate that word) is oversimplified. Even if the age gap is a contributing factor, it’s not the only contributing factor, and I think that ubiquitin made a great point about the musical chairs- to paraphrase, if you missed it, it’s one thing if there are always ten girls left out- it’s another thing if it’s always the same ten. To clarify the analogy, if each round of musical chairs is a “round” of dating, then if the same ten girls never get dates, we should figure out why that is.
The real problem, I think, comes when people try to take apart the “crisis” into very large elements- but there are practically NO “crises” where you can point at one culprit. Even in, say, WWI, everyone knows the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused it, but really that was the culmination, or even result, of a whole slew of real causes. There are so many interlinked causes of this “crisis” that singling out one won’t really do anything.