Yeah big data seems to be a place where this absurdity is amplified. Everyone wants the same small handful of people with those qualifications and everyone is like 10x the number of people... and none of them want to budge on what they offer / will take.
In the meantime plenty of good folks out there willing to get into it, but naw they won't take them.
A more subtle problem, besides employers not willing to pay with money, is that, more often than not, they can't actually "pay" with interesting work (or experience or growth or something similar).
Complaining about companies thinking (or just saying) they have "big data" when all they have is moderately-sized data is more common on HN now. What's more, even the very low bar of "fits in main memory" increases rapidly enough that "big" from a couple years ago might not be any more.
In the meantime plenty of good folks out there willing to get into it, but naw they won't take them.