I'm not even convinced they need to do that. Google searches are easier and more reliable (typo correction, auto-suggest, even basic phishing/malware protection).

That contradicts the idea that God does not deceive, which most Christians believe.

Oh, really? You'd better inform these guys, then: http://cpusa.org/

This already exists, and it's called Bodega. It hasn't caught on. There's also MacPorts and Homebrew, which are popular among devs but have no presence among regular users because they're for *nix command-line tools.

I believe the reason open app distribution systems like APT work so well on Linux is the "open culture": the vast majority of software Linux users want to run is Free Software. But can an APT-like system work as well with proprietary, for-sale apps? I know there are proprietary drivers and such on various repos, but I'm talking about stuff like Photoshop, Office, or the thousands of little paid apps you can get on iOS.

Yes, it'd be great if Mac users embraced FOSS more, but they won't do it as long as FOSS lags in ease of use and polish. And it will continue to do so because polish is hard work, and devs working for their bread are more willing to dish out the elbow grease. I'd love for this to change, but I don't really see how it can.

Or you could try working at a place that doesn't treat you like an elementary school student. Look at small businesses in particular (though there are many such large businesses as well). And don't give me the excuse of a poor job market, either-- if you can't find work, it means you need to loosen your job requirements to fit the market. Accept a lower salary, consider relocation, diversify your skills, or become self-employed. It's all a matter of priorities.

You don't really need to understand pointers to use ObjC, though. You use object pointers all over the place but you never dereference them, just send them messages. It amounts to the same thing as Java's object references, just with an extra asterisk in the declaration. You can of course use raw C arrays and pointers, but there's little reason to do so in most cases.

Manual memory management, though, that I'll certainly grant you. Mac OS programmers haven't had to deal with that since ObjC 2.0, but ObjC on iOS doesn't do garbage collection (supposedly for performance reasons). Autorelease pools ease the pain, but obviously not having to deal with deallocation at all is easier still.

Writing header files can be a pain, but they're not hard to grasp once you understand what a function declaration is, which you need to do for any language. Different from Java and a bit of extra typing, sure, but not particularly hard.

These are just personal aesthetics.

I wouldn't consider putting a session ID in the URL to be "user-unfriendly". Maybe a little ugly, but how does it actually impact users?