Seriously, though, check my post history. I'm more than just a recruiter — I'm a serious dev and I'm willing to bet I've released more open source code than most people on HN and I can almost guarantee it's more widely used. The reality is that many companies know neither how to source candidates nor how to evaluate them. Being well-known in some tech communities (https://www.google.fr/search?q=curtis+poe+perl) means I can evaluate those candidates and I can also source them.
Yes, recruiters have a poor reputation and there's a reason that many (most?) deserve that, but for companies who can't source candidates, they're stuck. Recruiters, particularly those who specialize, tend to have large pools of "goto" people that companies would never have, meaning that companies who can't find talent have little choice.
The reason recruiters are despised so much is that there's such a low barrier to entry to our field that this depresses quality tremendously. I don't like it either, but we're not all the same. Frankly, I wish there was some way to enforce standards for recruiters and find a way for both employees and employers to "out" bad recruiters.