I always wonder when I hear these sort of stories out coming out of odesk, freelancer or elance, if the sort of highly qualified developer is actally their target market. Now I am not saying that people on freelancer are incompetent but like the original post said they now don't have a network outside of freelancer which is far more imporant for an actual freelancer web developer as opposed to someone in india or the phillipines were freelancer.com or similar is their only opertunity for work.
Me myself living in small city in Europe. So it was a good starting point to kickstart my skills in programming, and hacking stuff together. Though the projects are mostly involving wordpress themes and etc. so it gets boring quite fast.
