How sneaky ;) But I voted anyways so it worked.

given that people suggest some AAA (high quality) games like CoD are shovelware, that requirement doesn't seem to be strict.

GOG has no history of selling Mega Drive/Genesis games. It's hardly an issue of being pick.

I'd personally rather see them selling Famicom/NES games as those can be rather challenging to get these days between needing a console to play the carts and Nintendo doing an unusually effective job about suing the rom sites out of existence.

Even owing the carts it's gotten to be a challenge playing the games.

I couldn't help but also notice that with the game releasing in about four days, information on it is scant, at best. No Mobygames page, GameFaqs only has one image & no data, and I've not heard a peep about it on social media, not even a RPS indie darling article.

Yeah. Makes a mockery of the 'curation' aspect really (although some 'casual' games are great).

I 100% agree with the OP in that the feedback i also get from devs is that they are LESS inclined to consider a GOG release AT ALL due to the perceived (amongst devs) likelihood of getting rejected, which just pushes (and locks-in) them to focus on Steam for PC.

Devs WANT a decent DRM free option as they are often game fans as well (especially in the indie devs) and fully appreciate what GOG offers.

However GOG is growing a reputation as an unfriendly place to try to deal with, and while curation is good it looks like GOG is taking it too far as that perception of increased chances of rejection for a dev is now widespread. So GOG is in effect shooting themselves, and their customers in the foot, while INCREASING the strength of Steam.

Edit: As an example Star Traders: Frontiers

https://steamcommunity.com/app/335620/discussions/0/1520386297704789795/

This isn't about opening the flood gates and becoming Steam. This is about your reputation with devs and the knock on effect flat out rejection (often with little explanation, i have heard is 'normal') is having ON TOP of the issue that Steam is just huge and offers more (as per that little quote from the Star Traders: Frontiers dev above).

GOG has to appear MORE attractive to devs, so you go to work at it to ENCOURAGE devs to consider you, not starting out put off at the 'extra' work and effort they will have to go through even simply in approaching your platform.

Another aspect that might be a growing concern, is that with Bethesda not putting Fallout 76 on Steam, you might see a general AAA dev approach that favours their own platforms over third party stores like Steam and GOG. Sure one game does not mean much, but it is worth following the trend here.

So IF we have a near future where AAA devs only publish on their own respective stores, that leaves the old games and indies left. So better foster the good vibes with all those parties as that might be all the future business left? If it's all on Steam that won't be good for anyone.

The dev himself has been quite quiet. I talked to him at some point about megadrive development, but couldn't get the information i needed out of him. AFAIK, it's one guy, and he's done a good job, but as far as i can see, he's basically been developing this for a few years all by himself and making fairly little progress overall. I think the biggest claim to fame with this project is that the cart might actually get made, which is a big deal, but it's basically cheap homebrew for a deprecated platform.
This is the big picture, overall, when it comes to GOG. Right now, though, i'm not worried since i'm stockpiling games and they're DRM-free. If something happens to GOG, i'm still good, so i'm not that picky on this issue, but i'd still like to see more variation here. Even if the floodgates opened, i'd still be cool: it's still a much larger platform than others for DRM-free, unfortunately. In the end, the platform that will end up with the most customers will be the one with the things that everyone wants. If everything you want is on steam, and you don't care about DRM, you'll likely use steam. If everything you want is on itch, you'll use itch. And all of this is irregardless of how hard it is to find something new to like: there are other avenues of finding what you want than a storefront. I notice GOG's storefront simply because i trust GOG to not reject things i like, which i keep having to remind myself that this is unwise. As a result, i've gone digging on itch and others, already, and have found some really nice things that i'm glad i've found and been able to play, since GOG doesn't have them. I'm more interested in DRM-free than GOG's curation standards, so if GOG gets too picky and alot more of the things i want end up on itch, i'm going to start looking on itch first, since that'd become easier.

For a while, though, i've googled games, which is also helpful if the game might be on a platform i have other than PC.

How do you know that everythinbg you hear is true? And why to you think this little quote from the Star Traders dev (a game I never heard of before) is representive for all those other indie devs out there?

If you want a curated store there will always be things that will be rejected that you liked. It's not as if they reject everything.

Keep going with the curation, GOG. If you happen to turn down a game I want, I can probably find it on Humble or Itch anyway, so no need to turn this site into the kind of junkyard that other sites have become (sites such as Steam and Itch).

so you essentially admit that customers cannot decide for themselves

what does it even mean

Yes.

This crap would be here without the curration system .

https://store.steampowered.com/app/892650/Play_With_Kizami/

What shocked me more are the positive reviews and the "reasons" why they have rated this positive.
"Well. It gets a recommendation from me because it never promised more then it provided. Which is more then currently expect from a lot of AAA Games these days... "

But nobody actually wants GOG to drop curation completely. Not even the OP does want this. If I understood correctly all the OP wanted was GOG to be a bit less relentless when judging about what games to offer here. Still curation but not such an extreme one.