Manufactured scarcity turned me off of modern cards. My first taste of cynicism was the 1996 Leaf Signature Series, where they released the same exact cards with bronze, silver, and gold embossed logos with increasingly lower print runs. I was at an age where I was thrilled to get any player's autograph, but I found it incredibly stupid that there was no difference between the images and the signatures that would make a gold card more desirable than a bronze.
Now it's grass background, cosmic background, rainbow in paper, rainbow in Chrome, wavefractors, shimmerfractors, sparkefractors... even tacofractors. It's mentally and visually exhausting.
But more to your point, my opinion of the industry finally hit absolute rock-bottom last year, when I read a thread about how Topps kindly replaced someone's 1/1 by simply printing up a new one.
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