What I am not in favor of is sugar-coating assessments out of social concern. Why do we put things in graphs? To draw conclusions out of them. The conclusion you draw out of a downward-sloping sales graph is not "Things are looking up!" The long-term strategy, which is laid out in the blog post, is to repeat the tactics (advertising) that failed before, seemingly without regards to understanding why they failed the first time.
(Which is fairly simple: it is virtually impossible to achieve a conversion ratio high enough to justify that price point with a ten-cent ad. You need to either charge much more or have a back end revenue stream. The App Store is not conducive to either. I pay six cents a click and sell an app for $25 and it takes significant work to make money and those numbers.)
He's in a much, much, much better position than half the gumball developers on the store now.
I agree with this assessment, which should be tattooed to the inner eyelids of anyone thinking of publishing for the store.
We've got some amazing new features that will be released before the end of the year (again, already paid for), and could spark another few weeks of above average sales. Even if the sales don't bounce back to the peak levels, we're leveraging our existing code base and will be releasing several new apps in the coming months.
As far as my long term plans... did you read the whole article? I said that I'm NOT going to do any major marketing until something changes. I'm focusing my efforts on what has worked so far: creating great apps and working with Apple and the press to get free marketing.
I wouldn't be so quick to write-off people's real-world testaments like that, especially when they are courtesy enough to open their books for other people to evaluate and apply. You sound like the armchair critics on TC, TBH.