Close to 90% of them are.... my-maemo actually doesn't have a repository at all. Click one of the download links (through 4 pages of ads) and you'll find the install file points to the repository at maemo.org (or one or two other sites as mentioned above). It's like saying "Why don't you have all the apps here vs the ones Google has?"

Admittedly, my-maemo.com has a nice interface, with screen shots of lots of the apps in the repository. At least until a certain date anyway... Looks like whoever was doing it has a script still pulling new stuff, but hasn't updated screen shots and such in a while. (Thus the "no icon" on newer items.)

As for must-have apps, I concur with Estel on one of them: BackupMenu. Make a backup, tweak like crazy, then make another when you're stable. It can really save your butt if you make a mistake, even if you just want a backup of a system file. (It's just a big compressed tar file...)

As for the "requirements" here, there's no requirements for putting stuff in extra-devel. Other than learning how to do so. Promoting things to extra-testing and extra proper on the other hand, yes... it's a bit of a filter, but it forces things in those layers to be a bit more stable. There's chatter now of loosening regulations a bit, with the slowing pace of development and testers. But as a system, it did it's job well over the past decade.

And yes, Estel... I though I made it clear that the forum was originally from tablettalk. The rest is from Maemo itself (garages, wiki, etc) and the talk forum was pulled in later. That's part of why there's a disconnect between they systems. (Different logins, etc.) Thanks for clarifying it a bit more though, since I wasn't apparently concise enough to get that across?