It’s very arbitrary and entirely up to the reviewer’s own opinion.
This logic has been shown to not work long-term. The marketplace was recently a graveyard, filled with abandonware, because who wants to spend time updating something that hasn’t produced a sale in 8 months?
These abandoned items are a liability. No longer compatible with the latest versions of anything, riddled with security vulnerabilities, sometimes even advertising support without actually providing it. A massive headache for customers and Envato alike.
I’m not a reviewer and don’t have full insight into their thinking, but given recent efforts by the team to clean up the marketplaces, I suspect they’re going to be very careful going forward about items that can (or often do) end up like that.
Unfortunately, it’s not, and it never has been. This is a private marketplace. I would guess that the vast majority of submissions have always been rejected. You can often think of our category as some kind of “shark tank” competition.
Is it impossible for your items to be approved with more work? I really don’t know.
Perhaps if you came back with top-500 quality design work, the “wow factor” would be so strong that you’d be approved. Perhaps with a genius new feature that changes everything, you could get through. Perhaps the item no zero chance no matter what you do.
At least in a traditional shark tank, we get feedback from the judges about why they rejected our idea. I can empathize with your frustration on that. But those competitions are usually quite small and focused. Here, there’s a constant flow of new submissions, they simply don’t have time to give feedback in all cases.
And with that, I leave one final comment. There are cases where the reviewer will hard reject with specific feedback. They do it more often than you may expect. In those cases, you have a high chance of securing approval by following their feedback.
But if you received the generic “quality standard” message, then I would say it’s not worth investing any more time into that item. This is a sign that they don’t see a path for your item to get approved, so there’s no specific feedback for them to provide.
Even then, some people have been hard rejected without feedback, and managed to secure approval later on through hard work. It’s a risk, like all competitions are.