"All that time spent learning about what and why Apple does what they do might have brought them to the conclusion that they ought to be doing the same thing."
I fear that conclusion.
But, really... concluding that courting developers pissed off with an arbitrary opaque process by giving them the same arbitrary opaque process makes sense to ... who?
"You have to imagine that they've just suddenly become inundated by thousands (10s of thousands? More?) submissions and the majority of them will be awful crapware that needs to be sifted through. "
But... they've had more than a year to prepare for it, they need people to want to write for this platform (ios/android still have a the lion's mindshare), and MS is one of the few companies that could afford (financially) to make this experience better than it has. Stop the dividend payouts for a few quarters and use that money to beef up what they seem to be saying is the new direction of the company.
I'm just speculating like everyone else. It's difficult to extrapolate from a single person's nightmarish experience what the experience will be like for an unknown but large number of developers. I hope that gets sorted out quickly. From some other comments it sounds like they still have some bugs in their process.
Unless Microsoft is purposely being opaque with details of why something has failed for the purpose of thwarting malicious or wayward developers, then they should take this as a hint that they need to provide developers with more information so they can track down issues and fix them.
I fear that conclusion.
But, really... concluding that courting developers pissed off with an arbitrary opaque process by giving them the same arbitrary opaque process makes sense to ... who?
"You have to imagine that they've just suddenly become inundated by thousands (10s of thousands? More?) submissions and the majority of them will be awful crapware that needs to be sifted through. "
But... they've had more than a year to prepare for it, they need people to want to write for this platform (ios/android still have a the lion's mindshare), and MS is one of the few companies that could afford (financially) to make this experience better than it has. Stop the dividend payouts for a few quarters and use that money to beef up what they seem to be saying is the new direction of the company.