You think all of that is bad, be thankful you weren't selling this software in a brick and mortar store like Best Buy back in the day.
Apple invested a lot of money to build things up to where they are now. Could they be a little more flexible with some new categories/tiers? Maybe, but that's stuff you need to bring to their attention and work with them on.
"back in the day" -- Totally different business model, totally different costs, totally different marketing.
Without the internet, your marketing is mostly signage and ads in papers, as opposed to Twitter/Instagram/Facebook and web traffic. But you still have to spend to get the customer. At the same time, though, your software has physical form that's noticeable on the shelf. In the App Store, unless the customer is coming from a direct link like a website, QR code, she doesn't even know you exist. As "things up to where they are now" -- Searching for an app in the App Store by keyword in 2024 still doesn't turn up what you're looking for, unless you're already well-known and have lots of people searching for you. You can bid on Apple Search Ads keywords, but it doesn't get you next to other items in the stores for people who are just browsing, like they would on a shelf in Best Buy.
Developers can also charge more for shrink-wrapped software because the rest of Best Buy isn't full of freemium apps conditioning users to the point that they expect not to pay for their software because they can just find a free alternative with ads. When a market is full of free software, and the high number of downloads from that free software feed into the search algorithm to rank those apps higher, you end up with apps that may be high-quality but also costly being virtually invisible inside the store. It's a race to the bottom. Making a high-quality app takes time, developer hours, and then the cost of marketing/search ads, but at least there would be more wiggle room in the shrink-wrap era to charge more to make up for it, whereas these days you're basically $5 or less unless you're Photoshop, and even then you may need to go to a subscription model to lower initial barrier to entry.
It would be great to "work with them" but they don't really listen. You can schedule a 10-min WWDC session with junior staff or standard marketing reps that will just parrot the App Store guidelines back to you, or file a radar/bug report that never gets read, or gets closed for being a feature. So while humans could improve the algorithm and help developers roll out their apps, they hide behind a huge backlog of bugs and developers that it's not really feasible to reach anyone, unless you're big with someone on your team that can pester/chase/follow-up/raise hell in places like news articles where they have to respond under threat of bad press.