I think we're all in agreement that this sounds like a cool app. I'm just lamenting the lack of creative authority given to its developers, regardless of whatever their future plans may be.
I mean, a movie release on DVD with just be movie and nothing more is simply not done and many people would consider it cheap and disappointing. The reaction most people who have to a movie that is only 20 minutes long is or a song that was only 30 seconds long is going to be similar: I doubt many movie theaters, radio stations, or content distributors, would consider the "short" sufficient.
In this case, we know the developers have "notes left to play", and could spend the time to do those now. Clearly, I would be the first to point at Apple and say "this is not a legitimate selection criteria" (sufficiently so that even bothering to say it explicitly is kind if redundant ;P), but if I were those developers... this is just a really self-defeating reaction that is not likely to sway either Apple or the people who actually like Apple not wanting to sell things that don't feel "complete enough".
Awesome idea! Throw this in a locked device with some kind of DRM to make sure our viewer has a fully immersive uniform experience, and I'm ready to throw my life savings at it.
(Apologies for that, I couldn't resist pointing out to you where that train of thought has taken the market. ;) )
Seriously: I appreciate the point you are trying to make here, but you chose a horrible example that I think actually argues that adding random features isn't a big deal :/. Besides, they already claim to have a bunch of features planned anyway: it isn't like the developers are seemingly of the "this is the exact app that should be released, and there should be no random additions or extra features added, as doing so would ruin the whole experience"...
> The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph views and scrubbing, ability to add media. etc... And by eventually letting people combine their data, you will be able to see how their relative happiness aligns to other users, a neighborhood and even the world.
(It is also possible, however, that I totally misunderstood your response, and you are actually saying that having a happiness index that you kept track of on a moment-to-moment basis while watching a movie would let you optimize the movie according to your personal tastes. I feel like that's lower probability--more dots need connecting for that--but if I did actually misunderstand your comment I'm sorry that my response just adds to the confusion.)