Of course it's the repo owners who run the ads, but it is Saurik who runs the store. I think having ads is fine, and it's great if the repo owners make some money or cover costs. The thing is, there should be some standards so that the ads are not so overwhelming and don't detract from the basic functioning of the store, which they do right now. It is hard to find proper information about apps because the apps are so slow loading and often overshadow the app data people are looking for.

It's not up to Saurik, he's not the one putting the ads there–it's the repo owners. Cydia itself is actually ad-free. The repo owners are inserting the ads in to the package description's "depiction" field which was originally intended to allow developers to force Cydia to load an external website in the package's description. This has become a tool to allow devs and repo owners to insert ads which are used to support the costs of running the repo server (ads, administration, etc).

I doubt Saurik will ever do anything about this because it's working exactly as he intended. In fact if you read his tutorial on how to create a debian package for iPhone, you'll see he actually encourages devs and repo owners to use that field to display ads: http://www.saurik.com/id/7

That makes complete sense. As I mentioned, I never fancied doing this one anyway – I would rather just see Cydia itself cleaned up a fair bit – but I do realize that may never happen. Any idea whether Saurik has ever said anything on this topic?

I did this same 'hack' awhile ago trying to speed things up. Not only does it take away the Purchase button, but it also takes away the 'more info', 'screenshot', etc. links. The extra speed was amazing, but it wasn't worth making Cydia near unusable to me.

Oh, that's a bit of a problem. Thanks for mentioning it.