Earlier quoted context omitted.
As mentioned further up, it's brutally difficult without anything like this. The App Store shows ratings for only the current version by default so after you slave over each upgrade, you lose all the great reviews you've carefully collected. Those ratings are critical to your success in an already difficult marketplace. Almost no one goes out of their way to review your app, so the majority of reviews you'll get are…
I understand that that is a bad position for developers to be in, but is that the user's problem? Also assuming users showing this behaviour are evenly distributed across apps, didn't this end up not mattering?
The problem is that anything other than small, one trick apps are unsustainable. Look at Sketch for example - a perfect app for the iPad form factor but it doesn't exist because the App Store economy sucks.
The thing is it isn't just discoverability, but there are way more problems to deal with. Especially in terms of customer service. As a dev you get no info from a purchase of your app unless you mainuallu collect it inside your app. Have an upset customer and want to refund them? You can't. Want to discount an existing user for a new paid version? It is a super awkward process with app bundles. Want to give out a coupon code for a new product to existing users of another? Nope, can't do that.