A big hurdle has been the part where jobs advertised as remote turn out to be not really remote in the initial phone interview. Having to be on-site for M days per week or N weeks per quarter, or even requiring an initial on-site training period of L weeks, still puts a geographic limit on what I can actually accept. Either a lot of people are lying about remote work, or the companies that are truly remote don't want to interview me--possibly both.

I haven't stopped applying, but my expectations have fallen pretty far since the first one I tried in 2008. That was Universal Mind, and they told me I didn't have enough experience in Adobe Flex to interview with them. I had worked with it for about 8 months at that point, which isn't bad for something released in 2004. So from my perspective, a lot of those companies seem to think that since they can hire from anywhere, they should only hire the top quintile of everyone, and my resume definitely doesn't radiate that rockstar aura.