As someone who gripes about it: I think $99/year is a perfectly reasonable fee in order to submit to the App Store. I just don't think it should be the only way to run my own code on my own phone (without jumping through the rediculous hoop of reinstalling an app every single week).
You just answered yourself. It's not a the only way to run your own code on your own phone. AFAIK that restriction is to prevent jailbreakers from easily sideloading paid apps as "their" apps on their phones.
But it effectively is! There is no way for me to make anything useful for myself if I have to connect my phone to a computer and reinstall the app every seven days. If I forget, the app suddenly won't open. If I go on vacation without a computer, the app won't open. The seven day thing is useful for testing, and nothing more.
If the goal is to prevent piracy, well, as with other forms of DRM I as a paying customer don't appreciate being treated like a thief. Dedicated pirates can and do just buy stolen enterprise certs on the black market anyway.
I suspect that it's all about "brand reinforcement."
Apple is (arguably) the world's most valuable brand. Those don't come in Cracker Jack boxes.
They don't want some knucklehead running around, showing some crapplet that makes the brand look bad, and they certainly don't want them installing said crapplet on their friends' phones, so there's a bunch of folks running around, making them look bad.
This makes that a lot less likely. If they restrict it to paid accounts, then they have an assumption that the people writing the apps are "serious" about developing decent software.
I suspect that a big part of them buying up TestFlight was because they didn't want a company out there, making it easy to install un-vetted crapplets into a wide range of devices (which the old TestFlight allowed).
I have some experience with this. I used to work for a world-renowned corporation that made photographic equipment. Their brand is right up there, with Apple.
They would go nuts about sample photos getting out of the company. It was really difficult to report bugs, or even share test results, because the sample photos couldn't make our cameras look bad.
There's a great deal of controversy about Apple's iron-fisted control issues, but I do understand. I'm not always happy about it, but you can't argue with the results.
Xcode is free, Interface Builder is free, all the documentation for everything is free. I'm trying to get into Windows development and don't use Apple devices, but I agree $99 a year for everything Apple gives developers is not expensive considering the value and the cost of these tools on similar platforms.
