I am probably looking at this from a bystander perspective, but what I see here is that Maemo is clearly transforming from cool and hack'ish mobile distro into more established and "serious" MeeGo OS, that is keen to attract the masses, hence "hack'ish" label isn't very welcome. This is why we get this discussion here: unofficial community powered extras vs. official Nokia's Ovi.

Personally, I wouldn't mind to see Ovi Store as a main source of 3rd party apps, but the trouble in my eyes is that... it hasn't got them. Apps, I mean. In fact, I hate HAM for its slowness, but this is the only way to get something fresh. If I could see extras-approved (aka maemo-select approved) apps straight in Ovi Store, I'd be more than happy to use it more often. But it simply doesn't happen. I'm not the one who answers "why?" question on that, as I'm writing this from bystander pov.

One more thought on QA side of extras. Although I've signed up for testing squad, I admit I didn't put much effort into this. Main reason is that I have my work and personal life aside of Maemo, which clearly isn't helping to get involved more. However I think this is important point - community don't get paid for their involvment, it's their free time when they get into it, hence we can't always expert QA will be as quick and good as we wanted it to be, and facing potential explosion of new apps once MeeGo devices start hitting public, community-powered QA might simply be not enough.

I don't think there's golden solution to this situation, but what I'd definitely would like to see is another step of "promotion" of extras apps to Ovi Store. So the process might look like: devel -> testing -> extras -> ovi, with more paid and dedicated QA testers (probably directly from Ovi) involved in the process. They could hand-pick apps from testing repo and help promote/demote in order to get ball rolling much quicker.

Don't know how T& of Ovi fit in such approach but anyway I see that as an option to consider by both sides.