It would hurt founders' perceptions but wouldn't actually decrease any individual founder's chances of success.
In a world where potential founders are making a choice between YC or doing the startup anyway without YC, sure. But the world is more complicated than that, and I'm sure there are plenty of potential founders whose decisions are informed by what they hear from YC.
[...] split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan [...] People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.
This sounds like a very good model, in that it would separate the "is this something YC wants to invest in?" axis from the "does Paul Graham think that I'll succeed?" axis.
In a world where potential founders are making a choice between YC or doing the startup anyway without YC, sure. But the world is more complicated than that, and I'm sure there are plenty of potential founders whose decisions are informed by what they hear from YC.
[...] split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan [...] People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.
This sounds like a very good model, in that it would separate the "is this something YC wants to invest in?" axis from the "does Paul Graham think that I'll succeed?" axis.