It's unfortunate that the Mac App Store most likely won't fail in it's current state. There are too many people that don't realize that they are purchasing the outdated or degraded experiences and are perfectly happy.
What's worse, as you say, is that there's absolutely no indication that some of those apps have been abandoned (apart from the very old Last Update date). The vast majority of consumers will just buy the software and not go researching whether the app they're acquiring has been left collecting dust.
And at the end, both consumers and developers lose out.
I've found that such conflicting feelings come up when I'm dealing with a poor solution to a nevertheless real set of problems. I think app stores in general are that -- they are a freedom-restricting, tax-extracting, capability-limiting solution to a set of problems around security, software package management, and quality control that could be solved much more intelligently.