They're not desperate and they don't want crap, which is why they have a high bar. The problem is the testing procedures aren't always consistent, so something may pass once and get rejected when you do your next update for a bug that existed in a previous version. But, that's the nature of testing - the same thing has happened for us on Apple's app store.
Android appears to be the only store that lets you ship anything you want.
That's not even relevant to TFA's point, which is that the review output is so terse and opaque it's not actionable and essentially resulted in him having to bug dozens of people and fine-comb multiple time through the application to find out what the issues were.
There wasn't any complex issue, all of them were nigh-trivial (except the D3D one maybe) and TFAA gladly acknowledge this, the issue he outlines is that if the reports had actual information in them it'd have taken him a day to get everything fixed rather than 2 months.