Editors' picks are always a wild card because you don't know on what basis the picks are happening. But your assertion that they're always about the "connections" you have strikes me as, well, very anecdotal. I have some experience on both the submitting and receiving side of magazines, and generally speaking what gets your story accepted is the quality of your story. People often assume you need "connections" to get into big name markets, but big name markets attract big name authors and that makes the barrier of entry much higher. I have no inside knowledge of Steam, but I suspect that's very likely what goes on there: the more developers want to be on Steam, the harder it will be to be on it.
Of course, Apple already has editors' pick lists which I've heard really do boost app sales significantly; the question is really whether dropping Top 10 lists would flatten the curve further; I suspect the sales would remain vastly overweighted toward the featured apps no matter what, but perhaps if the featured apps were rotated frequently that would help. I rather like one of the other commenters' ideas of keeping the top 10 lists, but just removing apps you've already purchased from them.
The App Store search is pretty bad, as other people have commented. (A lot of people think the changes to the store in iOS 6 made it worse, but it's not like it was good to start with.)