[RichardSimon]

Speaking from personal experience I can say that I do feel the autograph market is not attracting new collectors.
Years ago, it would be easy to sell the $10-$50 Hall of Fame autographs, often selling many at one time and it became obvious that I was dealing with a relatively new collector. The buyers of Coveleski, Dickey, Appling, Averill, Chandler, Doerr, Gehringer, etc. are now few and far between.
I still successfully sell quite a bit of material but rarely see the type of buyer that I saw 5-10 years ago.
I think the negative publicity (not necessarily here on 54) that has been in newspapers and TV reports has definitely hurt the hobby.
In addition the casual collector, who may become a serious collector, might have been burned on his first purchase. He might have wondered into one of those mall stores, estate sales, etc. and been fooled by a fancy and serious looking COA and that person is then lost to the hobby, if he discovers what he has bought.
I will repeat what I have said many times before, stay with the dealers that have established reputations as being honest and knowledgable and don't assume that because an item has an alphabet company COA that it is necessarily authentic. That fact has already been proven here many times from lower level items bought on ebay to multi thousand dollar items bought from big time auction houses.