My problem with the gatekeeping is that it isn't applied fairly. It's a central control point where a government can put pressure on the gatekeeper to suppress undesirable content. Plus, there are billions of people in the world who cannot qualify for Google's latest guidelines for becoming a registered developer. My team's app https://www.appdevforall.org/code-on-the-go/ is about empowering those people and if sideloading goes away then they won't be able to build and share the apps they need.
No, we're not worried about model extraction. The more people who use it, the better.
I'd love to shift the paradigm that mastering obscure arcane knowledge is some kind rite of passage for people to suffer through - that's a massive waste of resources. I want people to solve their own problems. If they use this model, then we've advanced the mission of my organization, which is to support the 2 billion people to be able to participate in the benefits of technology by (1) scratching their own itch, and (2) having a viable path to good jobs - even though they don't have high powered laptops/desktops and they don't have 24/7 high speed low cost internet.
Well, now you can write apps on your Android phone, at least!
We're thinking about putting it on the Play store. Or perhaps at least a stub app for discoverability and then let people download. We are looking at expanding our distribution channels in the next 6 months, which includes Play Store, F-Droid, APKPure, APKMirror, and others.
As far as telemetry goes, we've got some simple Firebase Analytics and we're using Sentry to capture crashes and stack traces.