"There's a reason why the article is scant on the details of the rejection"
Did you click through the link to the page where the developers were discussing the certification process on the Amazon developer forum? This is the link the article above:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?messa...
This seems as detailed as you will find for a critique of an app store.
And additionally, both of those developers linked to their own blog posts where they offered still more details:
http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification
http://ocean-of-storms.com/tsatsatzu/explaining-amazons-indi...
You say the final paragraph is the "icing on the cake". The final paragraph is a summary of what Joseph Jaquinta suggested in his longer post. The above linked blog post would be redundant if it simply copy-and-pasted everything that developers had written over at the Amazon developer forums. Like any blog post, it was written with the assumption that some people would click through the links to see the source material.