The take away I have from this interview is that it looks like playing middle man between commercial themes/plugins and customers does not work. There are two primary reasons I can think of that had so many people excited about an app like store 2 years ago. The first are the guidelines for getting into the official repository. Some companies/themes were not able to get into the repo and thus, fueled the idea of a seperate repo not controlled by WP.org. The second, even though they have, it doesn't appear that the WordPress.org repository will list commercial plugins. In fact, I know of at least a few big plugin author names that are behind the scenes partners of WP App Store.

It's interesting to see that most people are happy with going directly to the vendors site and purchasing what they need. Apparently, that's not a problem. Discovery is. The marketplace is vast and there are new themes and plugins launched what seems like every day. An excellent directory that made it as easy as possible to discover all of this new stuff would be a problem solver. Sites like http://themesorter.com/ exist as a discovery tool with coupon codes to boot granted their interface/design could use some work/simplification.

@Christina Warren - So if you don't create an account with each vendor you purchase an item from, how will they provide you support? Or, is the app store supposed to be the ones giving the support? Ben mentioned that most of the vendors listed take advantage of their post pack API so that when you purchase and create an account through the app store, those same credentials are created on the vendors site. Seems like that would be good enough?