I happened to come across this article while I was doing my research and even though I'm late to the party I wanted to piggyback and a few of your findings.

It seems that there is a great amount of failed startups on different stages (pre, early revenue, bootstrapped, VC backed etc.) that eventually just die out or even worse, someone reinvents that same product from scratch.

I think it would be of the best interest for the startup community if we recycle these MVPs instead of creating new ones from scratch.

That's why I built http://thriftmvp.com a high quality pre / early revenue MVP marketplace. Our mission is to tangibly reward tech founders by selling their discontinued MVPs to other founders / investors in an effort to: Reduce the number of failed startups, stop founders from reinventing the wheel and make the startup world a healthier space to be in.