Speaking as an iPhone, Android developer who looked into Blackberry, I can say that there was that fee. The $200 "bought" you 10 app reviews. After that you had to spend another $200 to get another 10 reviews. The same can be said of feature phone makers like Nokia that, until recently, required you to have 3rd party signing that costs quite a bit of money while Apple and Google where doing it for free. But in the end, Blackberry still relies heavily on J2ME. They extended the platform enough to be a smart phone years ago. In fact, to practically invent the term. But they have been surpassed and failed to keep up with the times.
The days when cell phone software went for $4.99 have came and gone. It is sad for developers. But RIM and feature phone makers adapted very slowly to taking the initial investment out of creating apps. And in the process they were surpassed in profitability by app stores with a smaller barrier to entry. I'm not going to pay more to make less. You either roll with the punches or you get knocked out by them. Nokia offers free signing now, and Blackberry is now free as well. The difference is that J2ME is still fine for feature phone development. Blackberry needs to give developers closer access to the metal, and to provide a much higher level of development tools than they are currently offering if they want to remain a smart phone competitor. As it is now, they are sort of the bridge between feature phones and smart phones. QNX was a good start, forcing us to develop in Actionscript was a bad lead off to that good start.