I've got a set, and can confirm they were pretty common in L.A. in the summer of '75.
As the story I'd heard at the Anaheim convention that year was that they were distributed as a test in Michigan and Northern California. But someone (perhaps Kmart, not sure) had a distribution warehouse in Northern California and stores in the LA area, so they ended up here, a market they weren't intended by Topps to be marketed in.
At the time my friends and I were able to get about 3x the amount of regular '75 Topps for them in ads we ran in SCD, TTS, etc. In time, probably due to them not being as scarce as originally thought, it's come down to parity. Charlie Conlon had "a few boxes" put away and would trickle them out, and it was only when he passed away it came out just how much he had stashed.
When I was putting together an unopened pack run about 10-15 years ago '75 regular was actually much harder than mini.
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