I'm the developer. Jettison and HistoryHound have always been available as direct purchases as well as through the Mac App Store. Given the sales volume I got from the Mac App Store vs sales through my website (see the comments about lousy discoverability), it wasn't worth investing more time jumping through Apple's hoops to ship products that would be inferior to what I can write outside the App Store. That doesn't mean I "didn't want to do the work" - it means it doesn't make sense for my situation and my apps. And that's just the case for those two. Two other popular apps I've written - Default Folder X and App Tamer - are impossible to implement in the sandboxed environment. In cases like that, Apple's sandboxing constrains what devs can viably do - not everyone can take the risk of bypassing the App Store, and if they can't, the Mac community misses out because those apps just never get written.

There was no way to do what i wanted to do "properly", I actually did put in all the work of getting it to work by the rules of the sandbox only to be faced with that annoying spinning gear in the top menu, which all my customers complained about.