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warshawlawas I've commented on in the past. Although in its defense, the excessive prices it had on many sets are now proving to be accurate, albeit years after the jacked up prices first were published. What is the old stock market saying: "Never wrong, only early"?
But seriously, looking at the trend you are referencing leads me to strongly question the analysis or the motivations of the SMR staff. IHMO, in this day and age of increasingly transparent data, there is no excuse for a book that is purportedly updated regularly to still be consistently off when it comes to a specific issue. Since I or anyone else of average intelligence can readily obtain pricing data from real world sales on ebay, the SMR staff's data gathering operation is faulty or the numbers are fudged. Either way, I do not put much stock in the SMR.
Assuming that no one is acting in bad faith to intentionally manipulate the prices of the SMR, my suspicion, and it is merely a suspicion, is that dealer ask prices reported to the SMR folks by their cadre of friendly dealers play a much larger role in pricing decisions than do actual sales results gathered from ebay and similar public sources and that the pricing philosophy at the SMR could be termed "sticky downward". For you non-econ majors, this means that their pricing philosophy is to raise prices readily but turn a blind eye towards general downward trends. I, being a trained cynic, believe that it is politically difficult for editorial staffs at any publication that relies on touting investments, let alone price guides like the SMR that both tout investments and serve as public relation tools for their other corporate services, to accurately report long-term or broad downward price trends because they tend to tick off readers and drive away customers. As the financial magazines have repeatedly proven, if you report enough bad results for a long enough time, people dread the mag and stop purchasing it.
You have the ebay data and can run searches to generate real time and realistic market information, so my advice is to not worry about the SMR or any other book that does not straightforwardly present actual results and concentrate instead on the actual results that can be mined from ebay's database if you need a specific price on an item. That's what I do.