Trade Chat PuGs and "Elitism"

So last night, a group of 4 or 5 of us were hanging around in vent together, bored out of our skulls.  It was well past midnight server time, nothing going on, and a couple of us had switched over to lowbie Horde alts to pass the time while chatting to the others.

Sometime after 2 AM server time, one of our crew spotted an ICC25 PuG forming, with a smallish guild leading the run and advertising in trade chat.  The raid leader had indicated he'd be checking people out with WoW Heroes, which was fine IMO because he wasn't just going to be looking at Gearscore.  All four of us have experience in ICC on our mains.  My guildie and I have done Lich King attempts in 25 man, while our friends' guild is working on Sindragosa - I have killed LK in 10 man and am 9/12 on Hard Modes, while the others are working on LK10.  None of our alts are undergeared scrubs, and we know the fights better than your average trade channel pugger at 2 AM.

We contacted the raid leader separately and asked for an invite - these are the characters we proposed to bring:
My resto shaman
Geo's arcane mage
Chim's marks hunter
Duce's survival hunter

One of us got in the run - the mage.  The rest of us were told we weren't geared enough.  Caydance was willing to accept that explanation - that was actually his least geared 80, and his character was showing on WoW Heroes as having ICC25 in the "yellow zone" for difficulty (the rest of us had it as green).