The discussion about what can be identified and who can identify it is an interesting one.
My take on it is that there are some very skilled people on both sides of repairs.
Doing the repair isn't hard, doing it so it's hard to detect is. And as far as I know, most real conservators don't try to make a repair undetectable, just undetectable to most people giving the item a casual look. They also do some important stuff like deacidifying the paper, stabilizing fragile pieces and doing acceptable and reversible stuff to ensure the item has a good chance of lasting a lot longer. In some hobbies, like old posters, that's entirely acceptable, in others like ours, it's not generally accepted.
Detecting some alterations isn't easy. At the International stamp expo in 2006, they had thousands of square feet of displays of all sorts of amazing stuff. The one I spent the most time with was an assortment of altered stamps displayed by the Philatelic foundation (One of the stamp equivalents of PSA/SGC but in many ways better than either)
I couldn't spot the alterations on nearly everything they displayed. Which was a bit scary.
They showed pretty much every sort of "improvement" that can be done. Tears fixed so they were nearly invisible, missing corners, sides etc rebuilt and added, watermarks and other features of the paper itself added..
I thought I was pretty good until I spent an hour looking at that display. I've learned a lot since, but would still miss a decent portion of what I saw.
That's why a marginally trained person giving a card a minute or so of inspection really just isn't enough.
As far as the paper being possible to duplicate, I'll say that getting close is possible getting close enough even using original material will still be detectable. Might it be "possible" to duplicate it exactly? Yes, but it's very unlikely someone will do it any time soon. The detailed technical specs aren't even known in a general sense, and those more likely than not vary between sets and possibly even between print runs. And that's just the paper.
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