and was surprised at how badly centered certain vintage cards that I had and loved were.
Same here. I've thought alot about this lately, and the best answer for this that I can come up with is that for many of us, the content was the focus when we were younger rather than centering, corner, and other imperfections. The exceptions to this were imperfections that grossly interfered with interpreting the "content" (i.e., viewing the card front, reading the back, etc.) like heavy creasing, bad focus, miscuts, missing paper, ink mustaches, etc. They became an issue for good reason: they distracted from the content. Next time you look at card, note the first thing you notice about it. I'll bet for many, their eyes go straight to the corners and centering first followed with an almost instantaneous valuation calculation (that was the case for me when I really paid attention to it). When I was kid, my eyes went straight to the photo first and foremost. I never gave corners or centering much thought until one day I opened a beckett price guide and notice the cost differential between NM and VG cards. Now corners, centering, and other attributes mattered to me, because the focus shifted from "content" to "value" (or at least, there became a shared focus between the two).
For the most part, it's my view that the whole centering thing is largely a trend/fad that gets repeated over and over on message boards to the extent that it's the "in thing." This has especially been the case over the last few years. It was not nearly as pervasive 5 years ago, as I recall, as it is now. Don't get me wrong - I love a perfectly centered card. But, I'm not going to fret over it and spend a ton of effort or money searching for one - way too much work to be fun for me.
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