For a product that's been around for only 16 months it's probably understandable that some applications are half finished, rough around the edges etc. The Maemo community is still quite small, and some of the more well publicised open source projects you are now familiar with on other platforms have multiple developers per project - in contrast, most Maemo projects are one man bands. This isn't a criticism of Maemo, just an observation to explain why some projects are taking longer to finish. Also, since these projects are staffed by single developers it's not unexpected that some projects come to a halt when the developer goes to college, gets married, has children, goes to prison etc.

It's very unstructured development because nobody is forcing or paying people to develop/port applications to the Maemo platform - people get involved for fun or to solve a problem they are personally experiencing. When the fun is over, or the problem is solved, they move on - it doesn't necessarily mean the project is as complete as you would like, but you can always take the code and finish it as you see fit.

The Maemo open source community is still quite immature, hence some of the problems you have outlined, and as such these problems should not come as any great surprise.

Will the situation improve in future? I've no idea, but in time hopefully more developers will get behind the platform and more projects will take on multiple developers so that there is no single point of failure.