Well, Apple has gone and made things worse for developers I think. In a recent post titled Apple-is-smarter-than-this-itunes-app-store-release-date-madness, I tried to summerize a few problems for developers trying to get their apps in the Released Date front page.
Up until now, both new apps and newly released updates appeared in the center screen “Release Date” section. This almost guarantees a nice boost in sales for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it looks like Apple is only showing truely new releases there now.
As a consumer, you may think this is a good thing so as to not clutter up that area. But it isn’t. It creates an incentive for developers to spend all their time making throw away apps (because only new apps appear in the spotlight) instead of polishing and making old apps better.
Maybe Apple is just tweaking the Release Date area and will allow updates to appear too, but if not, expect to see many more new apps with fewer updates and of less quality.
If there is no boost-in-sales incentive to update, why would developers bother?
(This being said, we have several updates almost ready to be uploaded 
)
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UPDATE: Iliya Yordanov from Cramzy.com has this to say: http://cramzy.com/news.php
Interestingly, the post (or rant) suggests the number of iPhone apps will actually dramatically decrease within a year due to the fact developers will be less likely to renew their $99 contract.
I really hope Apple isn’t going in this direction. I can’t see how this would benefit Apple, developers, or certainly the consumers.
The issue is being discussed heatedly on Apple's forums:
https://devforums.apple.com/thread/32599?tstart=0