There’s something important to learn here: since the App Store’s primary customers are mass-market, they don’t yet value apps very much, and are therefore only willing to pay a pittance for apps. For them, apps are simply entertainment, sometimes a bit more, but not much more. Perhaps that will change as these mobile devices increasingly replace the PC, perhaps not. But what’s also clear is that trying to sell a focused, obsessed-with-the-details app for mass-market prices probably isn’t going to work.

I will note that just because there is a huge new market for $4.99 limited function one-off apps does not somehow imply that the market for focused, obsessed-with-the-details software at a far higher price point has suddenly disappeared.

I'll happily shell out $29 to upgrade my Little Snitch family pack license from v2 to v3 once it gets out of beta, and I'd probably have paid twice that amount, were that the price. (Note how the dev maintained Snowy support since they understand that some of their customers might still prefer Snowy over the more recent OS downgrades.)

Folks like me are assuredly fewer than the folks downloading Angry Birds: Vice City, but we're still a niche with non-insignificant purchasing power.

I generally don't agree with Marco Ament, but I did find his The Mac App Store's future of irrelevance less disagreeable than usual, and it fits well within some of the issues you've been bringing up in this post.

My favorite pullquote:

The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases.

He also talks about how how he's suddenly decided that if a software product is available in both MAS and direct developer versions, he'll follow Rentzsch's advice. He's also suddenly noticed that the sun rises in the East. (I actually go further and have put at least a temporary hold on even buying direct developer versions of apps and upgrades from devs who are wasting their time with MAS versions.)

Quite true.

But separately, it's always worth remembering that if you're building a business dependent on Apple's app store, you've already sold out your business to Apple. You work for them. You don't get benefits, but you do work for them. They dictate what you can write, what code you can use, what content you can employ in your product, and not to mention, they can fire you for any unspecified and arbitrary reasons they choose. You are a genuinely a freelance contractor to Cupertino in this brave new world.

I'd rather work for Google as a real employee, were I in those shoes.

And now they don't have to worry about Apple changing their world by releasing a mail client, that, Hey!, looks a lot like Sparrow.

Be disappointed, sure. But, elevating spending a few bucks to buy Sparrow to the point of being a philosophy seems kinda odd to me.