The reason many apps start as crap is due to the arbitrary nature of the "standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no reason),

The reason many apps start as crap is due to the arbitrary nature of the "standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no reason), even after "suggesting" several changes that cost quite a bit of money. It is professional malpractice to council your clients to build anything other than the bare minimum before publishing (if you're a third party app developer as I am). So basically, Apple gets crap apps because good apps are too risky to build as Apple can reject it ex post facto. There isn't a way to even say, pay them 20k dollars to do a preapproval study. So no one is willing to drop the big bucks required to put out complex full featured apps until the app has been in the store and selling for awhile. Apple's approval process makes only iterative development worthwhile, and biases what people SHOULD be doing towards low cost work.