I don't understand how Apple, with all its money, doesn't have better facilities for dealing with this sort of thing - especially when they care so much about developer retainment.
Your question is perfectly natural, of course, given the way they flatter us developers in their keynotes. Just don't get caught in the reality distortion field. I've spent a lot of time working with Apple during good times and bad (for them), and even during bad times, the attitude toward third-party developers was that, if they weren't loyal followers, Apple didn't want them around anyway.
I was astonished to hear this kind of thing repeatedly at Apple HQ back when I thought they should have been desperately trying to woo developers to save their platform from extinction. Now that they are on top of the world, imagine what their (real) attitude must be toward third-party developers.
It's like the old Saturday Night Live parody of the phone company, when AT&T was still a monopoly: "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
The unpublicized truth is that Apple barely breaks even on the app store as it is.
> Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, added that the company runs its App Store and iTunes store “just a little over break-even,” to counter claims that the company is trying to use apps to drive up its profits.
saurik has also written a few comments about this - see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4155998
> ...despite their massive volume, Apple's App Store makes sufficiently little profit that they don't even break it out as a separate line item on their 10-Q (instead lumping it under "music related products and services", the same category that handles both iTunes and iBooks)