Going to come back and back to this thread often.

Force is a hard word, but you can be persuasive. Take Yerga adn WordPy. I really liked that app, and felt like you did. But I needed to make sure that in asking about what's possible to improve, that I also offered items to him that were doable.

A great looking UI also has an excellent process flow. If you will, seperate content from presentation from functionality. And so, with that app, the functionality was there, however the content couldn't flow with the user's expectations. We fixed that, and now the presentation layer can come in and be further cleaned up.

The UI was successful enough to move to Maemo 5 with little major changes to the presentation layer (icons and a few menus here and there).

Such successes come when a solution is presented, not just a critique. And I know you know this, so I'm more or less speaking in the hopes of helping others. But one of the best things about the Maemo community is that if you can think of something that can be better, you can package it up in such a way that even if you can't code it, that it can be well received.