Personally, I think your biggest problem is going to be that WordPress is a hunk of shit and the people who would make good first employees don't work with WordPress because they don't have to - I, personally, have done about at least 50 WordPress installs but I use it as little as possible because the codebase is a festering mess.
I don't know how to get around that problem, but if you figure it out I'd be interested in hearing how.
Sadly, I'm very much in agreement with your point; I don't want to spend every day of my working life hating the work I'm doing, and based on past experience, it would take minutes before that happened again.
Still, there are plenty of masochists out there, and also plenty of competent people who don't mind working on such stuff if the money's right, so don't give up :)
Plus, it seems like WordPress development is a rather crowded space... how are you going to differentiate yourself? I see a little bit of wanting to "own the market" here with the in-WP app store idea, but why would I go to you instead of going directly to the developers of the plugin?