This is such a popular feed, and so many people are asking about their chances, and a few people do write replies with their thoughts. I wonder what the result would be, if someone were to study the advice given and compare the success of those who are reassured and those who are cautioned. My bet is that the 'chart biopsy' approach to predicting match success is not very predictive. Rather than respond to one or another, I'm going to give some general opinions and advice for what it is or isn't worth.
First, please don't rely on advice online alone, from me or anyone. The people most likely to help you are the orthopaedics residents and faculty at your medical school. If you are an MS3 and don't know anyone in your orthopaedics department well enough to ask them about your application, that in itself is a problem. How do you know you want to join the field, if you have no mentors? If you haven't gotten to know someone by spending time in their clinic and OR? Quickly, name three or four orthopaedics residents at your program who you think would support your application. If you can't, that is a problem. Orthopaedics is a small field, and I made a bunch of calls over five years to residents at other institutions giving my recommendation (or, occasionally, otherwise) for medical students I had gotten to know. My own application to the three places I was most interested in were all directly helped by phone calls from residents I had gotten to know, and at each place faculty and residents commented on hearing about me before the away rotation or interview. In return I received several calls from friends (within and beyond orthopaedics ) at other institutions, to keep an eye out for an amazing medical student who was headed our way - this sort of networking and vouching for people led far more directly to residency spots than worrying about 2 vs 3 published abstracts. Also: if you get some solid but constructive advice, don't discount it or get defensive. Not taking criticism well is a RED FLAG in a medical student, because no one wants a junior resident who has such a liability.
Second, you really should rock Step 1. What exactly that score is year to year varies, but Step 1 scores are within your control to a large degree. It is a beatable test. The two biggest ways that program directors cut applicants is clearly by geography and Step 1 score. You can't control where you were raised and probably weren't thinking about the impact of your medical school location on where you'd be competitive for residency, so that is hard to change... a lot harder than doing whatever it takes to crush Step 1.
Third, if you really want to do orthopaedic surgery, you should know it, and know it with good reason and be able to articulate that quickly and convincingly. Know the field, its history, its current struggles, and have thoughts on where it is going. It is fine to be humble in the face of the field since you aren't yet a part of it, but nothing unsettles me about someone faster than realizing they had no idea what orthopaedics was, came from, or might be going. Well, except dishonesty - see below.
Your grades, scores, research, and geography help you get interviews - along with away rotations. After that, it is about your letters of recommendation and how you do on interviews. Do grades matter? I think they do, if your school has grades. But not just surgery and medicine. In residency there will be rotations you like, and rotations you don't. What the faculty cares about is whether you will work hard and take good care of patients regardless of your interest. That's why I wouldn't recommend taking it easy during psychiatry, or obgyn, or really anything else. You should do as well as you can on all rotations. And even if your school is pass/fail, you receive comments at the end of each rotation. Those comments end up in Dean's Letters. Some of the most compelling support for medical students I've seen have come from non-ortho, even non-surgical rotations. Comments about your commitment to patients, how nurses/patients/families seem to respect and like you, and how you work well on the team --- all those matter, a lot. Does research matter? Sure, probably at some programs more than others. Some faculty on interviews will love you for your research. And everyone would recommend getting that box checked, fine. But everyone wants you to be a good physician. So if you aren't doing an away rotation somewhere, you need to demonstrate that you are a good, kind, caring physician that they should trust with shared patients. And that isn't really orthopaedics specific - it's just that orthopaedics is at this moment in time more competitive than most other fields.
PD's cull the field with numbers and geography, aided in part by performance on away rotations. But I think PD's and departments rank people they can trust with patient care and the knife. To that end, being truthful about success and failure, challenges and things forgotten is paramount. Even a hint of dishonesty was enough to eliminate an away rotator or interviewee from consideration when I was a resident. Understandably so.
So I can't comment much on whether that set of numbers or this set of numbers makes someone competitive. A poor Step 1 score keeps you out of orthopaedics, which is an unfortunate truth - thankfully a good Step 1 score is far from enough to get you in. And once that first day of your away rotation or interview starts, your numbers matter a lot less than your character. My suspicion is that the horror stories about amazing-sounding applicants not matching anywhere probably have their answer somewhere in my un-requested opinions above.