[sHockz]

Yes, you are right, Steve Jobs' coveted iPhone has a classy way of browsing and selecting apps to BUY. With a myriad of people slaving away to approve apps and charge bundles, it is no wonder they have it working so smooth. Let me put it this way, if you want to buy a movie that just came to DvD, you can do 2 things:
A. Go to the store and buy it
B. Look through the internet and find the torrent file with english words (and german subtitles, lol!)

Their are several mediums to go about searching for software is my point. One is free, and requires a small bit of research, while the other costs money with more of an "instant gratification" feeling.
Personally, I think the iPhone app store is convenient, but extremely unfavorable. Apple must process, test, and charge for every app submitted. The guidelines for submitting apps are ridiculous, and not free and open. Google was recently turned down by apple for the app they designed, can you believe that?

To answer some of your q':
"1) Is there a FAQ or thread that discusses why someone would bother with a complete OS re-install (ROM) to simply get a few apps on their phone? I understand the need when moving from WM 5.x to 6.1 or to 6.5....but in most other cases is seems like a real headache. "
Mainly, what people are trying to do initially is get rid of bloatware and free up RAM. The Mogul is seriously underpowered RAM wise, so the performance boosts can be quite significant when done properly. Also, people like to be able to fully customize the phone from the boot screen and up. ROM's simply are an easy way to kind of 'get her done' without the hassle of constantly installing apps. It takes 10 minutes to load a ROM, and about 30 seconds to restore all your data.

2) Is there someone (or a group) that might be open to re-working part of the site into a more user friendly and accessible format for finding/dowloading applications?
I don't disagree with you on this. I would love to see more structure in the app browsing process. But a couple of issues arise with this, and can be explained fairly easily. First, you can't really compare our apps to Apple. Apple has a proprietary piece of software, and every app written is written for one single OS. Since they have such control over the OS, its patches, versions, etc, they are able to have a very large network of compatible applications. With Winmo, PalmOS, etc, you have too many OS's with too many versions with soooooo many apps for each one, that trying to catalog them is a nightmare. Each phone has different screen sizes, different hardware, different software. You really have to be quite specific when choosing programs to install, as a program might run properly but wont format to your screen. I for one would love to see something along the lines of what Apple has done, but getting that done will require an immense amount of time and effort.....which Apple has tons of once again.

People here are pretty nice and helpful. Don't be afraid to try things out on your phone. The learning curve really isn't that bad. If you are MCSE certified, then you should have next to no problems once you get started. Don't be scared to ask questions either. Just follow the directions, re-read the steps a couple times if you need to. Don't be put off by the super long posts about how to change out your ROM, once you get started you will realize it isn't that hard and doesn't take that long. So, hope I answered some of your questions and cleared some stuff up. Good luck!