As far as I can see, one of the problems with this gatekeeper thing, is that it doesn't scale very well - you can't do a proper job of talking to each developer

As far as I can see, one of the problems with this gatekeeper thing, is that it doesn't scale very well - you can't do a proper job of talking to each developer and making a fully informed decision in each and every case - they just don't have the time. So they've got a default 'No soup for you' policy if there are any questions about an app. Given that they apparently aren't short of new app's in the pipeline, then from their point of view, saying no to a few hundred won't make much difference to the platform overall.