I'm pretty sure their combined salaries are lower than the cost of the summer fellows program that SI was sponsoring four or five years ago. Also, if you accept my assertion that Luke could find a way to do it on a limited budget, why couldn't somebody else?

Givewell is interested in finding charities that translate good intentions into good results. This requires that the employees of the charity have low akrasia, desire to learn about and implement organizational best practices, not suffer from dysrationalia, etc. I imagine that from Givewell's perspective, it counts as a strike against the charity if some of the charity's employees have a history of failing at any of these.

I'd rather hear Eliezer say "thanks for funding us until we stumbled across some employees who are good at defeating their akrasia and care about organizational best practices", because this seems like a better depiction of what actually happened. I don't get the impression SI was actively looking for folks like Louie and Luke.