Developing extensions for Google Chrome is a particular form of masochism. They really don't seem to care. And things took a turn for the worst last December when the approval process went from hours to weeks.
Check out the Chrome Google group for a sample of the lost souls who hitched their wagon to the Chrome platform and now cry futilely into the abyss for support: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom...
It seems like all extension developers play the same game of guess-and-check to find out which permissions they should remove, and the unlucky ones get banned for trying too often.
These extensions don't make any money at all for Google, in fact some of them lose money for Google (privacy oriented extensions, ironically.)
They are a security nightmare for Google, capable of side channel browser attacks or direct abuse via a permission (all_urls permission can read your emails to grandma.)
Google doesn't want extensions to exist, and they also can't outright kill them without creating a new foothold for their competitors in the browser wars. So we get this intentionally masochistic process change. Jump this high or we'll ban you. Now jump higher but with your eyes closed. Okay, now backflip or you're banned. The extension developers have absolutely no power to fight back.