The process may suck for the developers but I agree with the article that it creates benefits for the end users. It's a core part of Apple's philosophy to cater to their customers at all cost. I am certain that apple pushes its own staff very hard to produce the quality of work they do, and when you sign up to become an Mac or iOS developer you become essentially an apple employee or contractor and as such you have to follow the company culture and philosophy just like the internal staff. It has been working for them, the company is thriving so why change course?

I think there may be merits in the arguments made for third party app repositories for iOS but I believe that there is some value, real or imagined in knowing that an application has the stamp of approval of the company that created the platform.