>Still, it makes sense that Apple would continue to deprioritize developer relations (either implicitly or explicitly.)

Yes. I think it also makes sense to remind ourselves of how Apple and Microsoft started in the 1970s. They have very different origin stories.

When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were burning the midnight oil for their first successful Microsoft product, it was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. It was a product for programmers. Yes, Microsoft went on to dominate with operating systems (first DOS, then Windows) but they have "programmers" within their DNA. The CEO of the company (Bill Gates) was an ex-programmer and that perspective cascaded all the way down as direct and indirect decisions in what they did. People mocked Steve Ballmer's stage antics about "developers developers developers" but Microsoft really did pay attention to programmers like no other major corporation. The high praise of Visual Studio (in comparison to other IDEs such as Xcode, Eclipse, etc) is one testament to this. So are dev friendly connections with their internal programmers such as active blog posts and channel9.msdn.com featuring informal whiteboard coding sessions.

Contrast with Apple. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were burning the midnight oil assembling the Apple I to sell to consumers. Wozniak was a programmer but the coding was incidental to making the Apple computer work. (E.g. his triumphant story of programming the floppy disk controller to work correctly.) They were selling end-user hardware and not a programmer's product like Microsoft. In 2011, none of the top 3 guys (Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jony Ive) were programmers. Craig Federighi is an ex-programmer but Apple doesn't seem like the kind of company that would hand the reigns over to him if Tim Cook stepped down. Craig is a powerful figure at Apple but obviously, he doesn't have the clout that Bill Gates did at Microsoft. The way Apple originated in 1976 has had a ripple effect all the way to the present day in 2015. It guided their org structure and their attitudes towards 3rd-party developers. As a consequence, we should expect blogs in 2015 complaining about their "hostility" towards developers. It's just the way Apple has always been.

As for the issue of too few developers making money in the App Store, I have an opinion that programmers are not going to want to hear: Let go of the idea that you'll get significant income from the App Store. Consider the few megahits that happened (beer drinking app, fart app, Flappy Bird, etc) as outliers and lottery ticket winnings. Sort of like the guy that sold 1-pixel-per-dollar on a 1 megapixel billboard when the web first appeared.[1]

I believe the only realistic way to view the App Stores is to think of it as an adjunct function to something else that makes you money. In other words, you just can't write a college study iOS app for $1.99 and expect income but instead, you create a whole college assistance website and the iPhone app is just one gateway to that functionality. It's the website that has subscribers and generates the major revenue. It's sort of like the "enterprise" model. American Airlines doesn't "sell" their iOS app; they sell plane tickets and the $0.00 app is just their way for customers to conveniently generate boarding passes, check gate times, etc.

That's the financial picture I've come to accept from the App Store and I recommend programmers consider it to avoid heartache. There's no need to complain about getting a "bigger piece of the pie" from the App Store because there is no (predictable) pie of any significance to fight over. I put predictable as a qualifier because I'm not dismissing that the megahits can make a lot of money. You just can't depend on it.

[1]http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

EDITED to fix spelling errors.