I used to work for some growers on various bits of custom systems and some of those fruit names were their big sellers.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...
Consumers want the same fruit all year round even though growing fruit(or any plant/vegetable) is very region & season specific.
Growers are big cargo cultists when they see a particular crop getting attention they all rush in. The past 5 years has seen record planting of avocado crops in Australia that now the growers either rip them out or have to sell the farm.
Just enjoy a delicious tasty snack in the appropriate season, and if it’s not on the shelf when you go to the shop then find another in season delicious tasty snack.
Apples have not, and I think that's great.
Is this because other fruit varietals are generally not significantly different? Is there some special sauce behind apple distribution?
I use this site for many years: https://www.orangepippin.com
The site is caught in something of a bind as to its name. "Pomiferous" isn't correctly formed; it means "fruit-bearing", because Latin pomum refers to all fruit equally.
The word for an apple is malum. But in an English-speaking context, that will tend to confuse people over similarity to the word for evil, which is... malum [compare "malevolent"]. (In Latin, the word for "apple" has a long A, while the word for "evil" has a short A, but this is not a distinction we can draw in English.)
-logy is a Greek-derived suffix and you'd want a Greek root. For apples, the ancient Greek word appears to be "melon", so your word would be "melology".
"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.