I'd say it's a pretty important perspective and it deserved better than what was given by certain camps.

My development history is quite varied. I do Hazel alone. During the Java years worked on various teams of various sizes and was a director of a department at one point. Lighthouse was a pretty small company yet produced quite a few very featureful apps. I'd say the ratio of engineers to apps was close to 1:1 but through very smart planning and rotation, great talent and use of well-written common libraries, we were able to support them all. Some of their apps formed the spiritual basis for apps you use now (Diagram->OmniGraffle, Concurrence->Keynote). Actually, those two programs were either written by or lead by ex-Lighthouse people.

BTW, one factor which is sorely missing on Apple platforms but was standard in Java was documentation. With javadoc, you had a standard documentation system and people used it. I'd say that, more than anything, was what kept things together. Apple has dallied with various doc systems in the past but never really went all in and had it fully integrated into Xcode, which is too bad.

The point here is that the focus should be on shipping apps. Not on appeasing some academic ideal or writing types of software that aren't really Apple's thing (like servers, for instance). I think chasing either at the detriment of the true goal is something that needs to be watched.