This statement should concern Salesforce more than any hackathon results: 'Anyone developing Salesforce apps will not raise a stink as it will hurt their relationship with that company'

I've worked with Salesforce for 4+ years now (as customer and partner), and sadly I agree with you. This should be the message that someone at salesforce reads. Want to be invited to their pilots? Want to have access to their PMs? You had better not say anything bad, I even had my AE pull me aside when I was out there for an EBC to tell me to not bring up their recent service outage during the meeting. If you don't have anything nice to say about salesforce, they don't want to hear your voice.