I agree completely with your sentiment, /e/ has to take the high road on the app front at this point or risk seeming hypocritical. I do hope they figure things out because the vision is great and what the tech community needs.
What really excites me about /e/ is the included cloud services. I could probably deal with only using FLOSS apps but I personally don’t want to spend the time with installing and maintaining my own cloud, which is really what makes smartphones compelling to me. I am hoping we get a decent answer this week about apps.
But I do accept your point, we can’t expect others to respect us if we don’t respect them. If /e/ wants to entice developers to their platform they should start out on the right foot.