Mashable has a story, "iPhone App Store Prices are Outrageous and it Needs to Stop" which criticizes some of the crappy applications available in the AppStore.

...but why hasn’t anyone even mentioned the fact that most of the paid applications aren’t all that great and more often than not, they’re incredibly overpriced?

The problem is not the prices or quality. The real issue is there is currently no way to try an application before you buy it. While there is a review system, this is not the same as being able to download play with it for a little while and then make an informed decision. Crappy overpriced software is much harder to spot from a picture and a couple of reviews. Spend a couple hours/days with it and it removes a lot of the guess work.

Currently the only viable work around to this is the Freemium path applications like Twitterific are using. They provide a free (in their case ad supported) version and allow users to purchase a separate version that has more/enhanced features (and no ads).

There are a lot of other applications I would love to try in the AppStore, but so far the quality bar has been pretty low. As demand increases for applications (and more developers learn their way around the SDK), I expect the quality will increase . Hopefully there will be an update in the future which makes beta testing the applications (even if it is only in iTunes) possible.

Update:
According to TechCrunch, Apple is doing to let developers pick 100 people per application to beta test it. This should help ensure a wider audience can give the application developers feedback, but it does little to help make it easier for me to try something without having to pay money first.