"why didn't you spend your unemployment working on a project to flesh out your portfolio?"
Could the real answer be that you are just the kind of person who considers spending time on a reverse job application and then advertising it to be time better and more efficiently spent than working on a portfolio? And that is at least one of the reasons that you were probably hired by hopefully one of the better employers that were able to recognize that.
While that may be true, if I recall correctly he was unemployed for over 2 years. I have a feeling the reverse application didn't take up all of his time.
> "why didn't you spend your unemployment working on a project to flesh out your portfolio?"
Who cares? Generally the last thing I do is try to get practical with my portfolio just to impress some third party; depending on who you are, what field you're interested in, and everything else in your portfolio, the projects you produce will only vary as much as you originally imagined them.
If you're projects aren't interesting to you, are they really worth doing? All this aside, if I were OP I wouldn't be shy about chalking-up this experiment as a "project" since most ad agencies and creative types eat this stuff up.
Could the real answer be that you are just the kind of person who considers spending time on a reverse job application and then advertising it to be time better and more efficiently spent than working on a portfolio? And that is at least one of the reasons that you were probably hired by hopefully one of the better employers that were able to recognize that.