Just realized I went a bit long on this one. Apologies in advance but I think it's worth a read.
On a more serious note, I see a lot of good points on both sides.
I've been in the hobby for ........... about 40 years, maybe longer depending on when I figure the start to have been. Other hobbies longer, not quite 50 years.
Over that time I've seen a LOT of changes, both in available information and in how hobbies are participated in. Some of the biggest have been in information and available experiences. When I started there were very few books of any kind, the only ones I knew of for cards were the Sports Collectors Bible - which listed a massive number of baseball sets but "sports" was a stretch since it only covered baseball. Most had no checklists, and there were no pictures! The other was the then new 78 Sport Americana checklist book. (That's what I used it for, so I'm sticking with it) Which had far fewer sets, but had a picture of one card from each set. Not in color, but a picture.
Oh yeah, there was a short list in the book of lists of the 10 most expensive/rarest cards. That's where I learned about George C Millers and why I bought the first few I got. There was really nothing at all on anything that wasn't a card. So all I knew I got from the local dealer who was knowledgeable, and the occasional show. At least until I found SCD which had articles.
One of the experiences that younger collectors just can't get anymore is
routinely seeing/handling a lot of old cards without there being some plastic involved. Every dealer had stacks of vintage cards if they had any at all. And they were just set out on the table in stacks. There's really no better way to get a literal feel for what a real card is compared to one that's not "right"
The same thing would go for any other ephemera. At the time there were few fakes, and when you found stuff like photos there would be loads of them. Bats, uniforms etc not as much, but there weren't many replica uniforms. Bats still had the whole Store bat/Pro bat/game used thing, but unless it was a big name there wasn't much financial incentive for fakery. My Dwight Evans Game bat which is cracked was a whole $9 !
The internet has really opened up a lot of information, and it's far easier to learn what a particular item should look like. And that's good, since the money has gotten big enough to attract what are probably some of what I'd call "casual fakers" the people that make their best misguided guess, add a to them plausible story and try to sell stuff. Before I learned a few things I was partway there. the first 10 speed I had had a bunch of races listed on the stickers. I thought those were all the races it had been in until the bike shop guy pointed out that if that was true it would be individual stickers and not one big one. And besides they didn't get little stickers for racing. It was a bit of a letdown, but once I heard it I realized I'd been wrong.
None of us learned stuff entirely on our own, someone somewhere along the line either told us or pointed us in the direction of the information.
So even if their methods annoy, lets be a bit more open with the new guys eh?
Now Stephen, here's the bit you might not like as much.
Most of us old guys are from what I call the "thunderdome school of business" whose motto is as you might or might not have been able to guess is "bust a deal face the wheel"
We totally don't get the whole thing of buying something then returning it. Sure, that might be ok with say LL Bean and Amazon who sort of encourage it. (And Ebay to some extent) That's what I really dislike about internet shopping. I can't actually hold the item, and can't really ask any detailed questions. So if the fabric on that new jacket seems flimsy or the controls on the new electronic device don't make sense, I'm pretty unhappy. But even then I almost never return anything. I may not buy from a place again, and I may be grouchy about stuff like my &((&^ tablet that won't stay connected to Wi-Fi even when it's 3ft from the router. But I don't return them.
I've bought a few collectibles that weren't quite what I thought they were. And I kept them, because the mistake was pretty much all mine. (Since starting Ebay in I think 98 I've returned one card. Trimmed, but not disclosed, and with a scan that was really misleading. And exactly no contact from the seller until I filed a formal complaint. ) Generally I try to learn stuff ahead of time, go with my instincts if I don't have time or can't find the right info, and live with the consequences. That being said, as a seller I had extremely liberal refund/return policies which I never put into writing because they were a bit too open. Most items that people had a legitimate problem with I refunded without taking a return. Maybe three items over 10 years.
I can't imagine trying to jump into fairly expensive stuff without developing a solid baseline of knowledge. And I really can't imagine using Ebays policies to essentially force a seller to either become my teacher for free or provide my study materials also for free. (I do however give you credit for donating some money towards the sellers little league as it sounds like he was selling to raise money for them. )
Sometimes a little harshness can make you better. One of my other collections is a group of stamps from the 1870's. Lots of errors many of them rare but sort of inexpensive. I joined a national club to get access to a series of articles about the mistakes, and had a few nice emails with the author discussing technical details. Then I found a stamp that was a fairly big deal - at least to the 5-6 people that might actually care- and sent him a scan and brief description of what I thought it was and asking for an opinion from a more experienced set of eyes. His response? A very terse "go do your own research" Kind of a bummer at the time. After a week of feeling bad I wrote the article about it- which sort of contradicted one of his. I realized that I didn't need a more experienced set of eyes, what I needed was confidence in my own! When I eventually talked to the editor of that section he asked if he could show the scans to that guy. So I told him the story. And he laughed
Turned out that when the guy who told me off was getting ready to write his first article the guy he'd been learning from did essentially the same thing to him. The editors were amazing, and in a very short time made my passable article into a pretty good one finally showing a photo of a variety that had never been shown as a photo and had last been described 80 years earlier.
Steve B