Did you just not feel like arguing with the app store review team or was it a clear decision between changing it or leaving the app store? The author of amphetamine told that there was a similar problem but apparently he could settle this.

> Amphetamine updates have been rejected by Apple on numerous occasions. One time, Apple’s App Review Team did not like my “Preview” screen shots. Another time, Apple objected to the default behavior when clicking Amphetamine’s menu bar icon, saying it must open the menu by default and not start a session.

Amphetamine changed the default.

> I removed Caffeine from the App Store when Apple started complaining

Good for you! That is exactly what everyone needs do when Apple starts being pointlessly petty. Yes, operating systems have UI guidelines. But they are guidelines - sometimes a developer may come up with something better, especially for power users, and no such developer should have to waste time trying to communicate and convince some committee of this, and worse, wait for an approval from them to launch the product.

In my opinion they made the right choice here -- that is a much different behaviour than any other kind of menu bar icon has and it would be inconsistent with every other app and the OS itself.

It's a neat idea but that is just not the use case the menu bar was designed around and I don't think it makes sense for individual apps to go against the current in that way

This behavior design choice is exactly why I use caffeine :)