I don't know if my experience is an isolated case, I hope it is. I get the impression that Nokia effectively only intended to make the N9 dev kit for commercial developers available to previous Symbian third-party developers. New commercial developers coming from iOS or Android or Maemo usually aren't that active on forum.nokia.com (now developer.nokia.com). It is mostly used by Symbian developers to get support, and mostly these developers would know about forum nokia developer launchpad programs.