I would only say that do not see it as white and black. There are a lot of small companies in tech who are successful. The problem of Jolla was a priorities. They went too loud but too slow. And the shaming of community was the "wake up call" first, but they ignored.
Paid apps would maybe help to keep a lot of devs from TMO which could bring more awareness of device and more devs/customers as an example.
So again, I do not think the main problem is HW problems(after all they are SW company, or am I wrong?), but strategy, communication, promises, PR, hiding things. Simple as that.

Btw community here still keeps maemo5 running. The problem is that community is not your slave and you cannot control it, it needs mutual aims and interests. But they tried to use it where they need(fanboys with PR, port things), but on other side they did not give back a lot(you need hackers, you can't limit them to specific area and close everything around, even MS gave tshirt to first person who jailbroken WP phone. A lot of big companies going that way nowdays. But if you want to do it all by yourself, you are left alone with bunch of people who just makes PR for you)