I quite agree that the current Nokia apps will almost certainly look nicer in the short term, and it may well be that it's simply not possible to use the Harmattan/Nokia-Meego UI + apps for whatever reason which means we'll need to write/port our own replacements if we wish to use Meego (or even a more up to date Maemo).

I would hope that with a common goal of creating e.g. a media player, people could create (or more likely port across) something that's usable and able to be fixed by those with the skill (though it would be good to have a standard app in mind to avoid fragmentation).

Unfortunately it's generally quite hard to get people to focus on prettiness and efficiency (unless that's their job or their passion) when there are other cool features to be added or applications to add. Conversely, once something works, then the drive to do anything more often evaporates. C'est la vie with OS and having access to the existing source code might make at least some of this less difficult (prettiness and efficiency have presumably already been implemented for the most part, so we could just add features.)

Whether or not this will actually happen I don't know - if a new Nokia phone running Harmattan is released, devs will naturally gravitate towards it, which will reduce the number of people trying to write replacements for the N900 + plain Meego (for instance).

I suppose the best course of action would be for us to start writing apps now for the N900 running Maemo + Qt (i.e. portable to Meego once it's day-to-day usable), but then the question of which libraries to use, compatibility between versions, etc. raises its head.