Steam Greenlight

Compared to self-published works, sure. But compare them instead to the old standard, the likes of EA, Ubisoft, and Activision, with their buyouts, exclusive contracts, editorial control, and very small volume of profits returned to developers. This is a big step forward, and will help break ground for others to follow in the future and take the ideals even further.

(Of course, the old publishers also made large initial investments in games/game studios, but there's good evidence that such investments are no longer necessary for quality games to be produced, and when they come with so many strings attached it's easy to see how the quality can suffer)

Goes to show that it's not necessarily the type of system that matters, but its incarnation. A democracy can be hell, while kings can be benevolent.

I'm not trying to imply any judgments about steam vs apple necessarily, but a more general point.

If your brand is based on strict curation, then accepting the union of the selections of your curators and popular demand removes that strictness. It didn't sound to me like they're accepting the intersection of the two methods.