Not a fan of SSPC. The whole project feels unauthentic to me although that is more a belief based on emotion than fact.
In terms of the conflict between nice high grade cards and ungraded junkers, I accept both into my collection but I tend to compartmentalize. All my Yaz base cards must be PSA 7+ and I like it that way, but for my 1960-1990 HOF RC collection it's all ungraded and there are a lot of poor cards in there -- both the Seaver and Ryan would grade 1 if I sent them in and that's ok. Other than feeling like my collection "should" have these iconic cards in them, I don't feel a huge emotional attachment to them, whereas Yaz was my guy growing up. That doesn't mean I have zero emotional attachment to those cards or I wouldn't own them in the first place.
There's an element to my collecting of "if I die I would want the people who find my collection to be impressed," which is silly of course and perhaps emblematic of human limitations, or at least my own.
For reasons illustrated above I have shifted away from high priced examples of Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Clemente, etc. The ones I have are all raw and mostly low grade. Several have great centering and eye appeal and a few do not, although I have pared down the ones that don't. Gone are my Brooks Robinson and Bob Gibson RCs -- I had them in beautiful midgrade examples but I sold them and replaced them with Red Sox pre-war because I'm a Red Sox fan and I decided I wanted my Sox collection to be more impressive. Oddly, I also branched out to 21st century Red Sox cards this year. They are mostly super cheap. I buy ungraded. Hell, these guys won 4 championships, so I want the Ortiz, Manny, Varitek, Lester, Pappelbon, Wakefield, Elsbury, Beckett, Koji, Victorino, Gomez, even a-hole Curt Schilling, Bellhorn, Pedro, Damon, Youk, the Drew brothers, etc. represented in my collection. Much of what Topps has produced in the 21st century is not to my liking, but they made a few awesome sets, particularly 2011.
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