Wait, so the reason why google is evil in this case is because the extension was requesting multiple overlapping permissions, some of which were subsets of others?
My point with this post isn't that Google is being evil, it's that what they're doing is frustrating. And the most frustrating part isn't even that they rejected our extension on a technicality, but rather that they weren't consistent with this policy, as demonstrated by the fact that they accepted the exact same extension with the exact same permissions a couple months earlier.
The reason google is evil in this case is they wouldn't deign to provide any information when it was requested to resolve the problem.