Agreed, hoping for $100-$200/hr for all devs across the world is wishful thinking. When things 'level out', one would expect it to tend to the average, not the outliers.

I heard this a decade ago, and maybe this time it will actually happen, but the third-world has yet to suck down the wages of domestic software developers.

It will probably tend to the minimum. But the minimum is constantly rising, as the standard of living in the developing world rises. So it's not unreasonable to think it will level out around the current US rate. Indeed, eventually it will be a uniform $1000/hr, because of inflation. Then $10,000/hr, and so on.

Much easier to have this conversation in constant (inflation adjusted) dollars.

The process isn't perfect, but it isn't nearly as bad as you are ranting about.

It's not perfect, it just leads to the same distribution of crappy/average/great apps as Google's Play Store, except that submitting apps to the Play Store is instantaneous.