What's so odd about all this is that lack of transparency why things fail was (is?) a huge issue in the Apple App Store process, and MS has had years to learn about what went wrong with the Apple process, and design around those issues. They seem to have baked those faults in to their own process. "We're backed up with submissions". WTF? They've been doing roadshows and having dev evangelists push the heck out of "de…
All that time spent learning about what and why Apple does what they do might have brought them to the conclusion that they ought to be doing the same thing.
Or maybe they're "backed up" while they take it all in, figure out what's crap and what's not crap, create a good initial sorting of non-crap -> crap, and then open the flood gates a little more.
You have to imagine that they've just suddenly become inundated by thousands (10s of thousands? More?) submissions and the majority of them will be awful crapware that needs to be sifted through. It takes a lot of time I'm sure -- I don't care how many people you put on staff.