As I see it, WordPress plugin authors who are worried about making money should spend less time agitating for access to the plugin repository

Agree entirely. I've not put a plugin in the repository, or updated any that are already there for a while. Have no intention of putting any plugins in there at any point in the future. To be honest, thinking about it, I haven't actually downloaded a plugin from there for, well close on a year now.

If you had capitalized upon that spotlight by releasing any sort of plugin within, say, a year, I have no doubt that you would be making a good living from it now, instead of being written off as vapourware.

Strange that nobody has noticed that when someone reminds me of that link, I tend to go and work on some other projects for a bit before coming back and scrapping what I had and starting from scratch. :)