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I think the above paragraph expresses very well the sentiment of many developers who strongly oppose, and in many cases are downright offended by, Apple’s new Section 3.3.1 restrictions. “Let me take the risk of a chasm opening between the middleware I want to use and the underlying Cocoa Touch frameworks,” more or less.
And that’s totally reasonable. But Apple’s perspective is reasonable too — they have suffered in the past when popular developer tools and frameworks have been out of their control. At this moment, Apple has the clout to forbid these “third party layers of software between the platform and the developer” by fiat. If they waited until actual compatibility problems arise in the future, it might be too late — at that point, if the incompatible middleware systems are popular enough, the clout will reside with the collective third-party developers relying upon the middleware, not with Apple. Apple can ban them by fiat now; they can’t ban them by fiat in a future where they’re in widespread use.
