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PaulFor vintage cards, why don't we just dump the label "rookie card" and substitute "first card"? Everyone then would agree that Kid Nichols' "first card" is his N172, and Joe DiMaggio's "first card" is his 1934 Zeenut. If someone wants to come up with a new designation like "first major league card" that's fine too.
When I began collecting, I don't recall anyone chasing after "first major league cards" though some people chased after "first cards." If someone wanted a particularly early card of a Lefty Gomez, for example, that collector wouldn't try to figure out if the US Caramel card was issued before or after the '33 Goudey. He'd buy the Zeenut.
As far as I can tell, the reason this changed is because card companies went nuts in the early 1990s. They started printing cards of promising teenagers so that they could advertise that their set had the most rookies (and therefore the most investment potential). The companies clearly went overboard. Ever seen a 1992 Mariano Rivera? He looks like he's waiting to catch a bus to take the SAT exam.
Eventually, many collectors decided that these pre-teen cards were illegitimate. They were contrived rookies, not legitimate rookies. And so the search began for a revised definition of a rookie card -- one that would separate the high-school-yearbook-photo-with-high-school-stats-on-the-back from the legitimate first card of a player.
There are no similar issues of legitimacy with vintage minor league cards. Zeenuts and other vintage minor league cards were distributed because kids in minor league towns wanted cards of their local heroes. They weren't produced by scheming card company executives trying to figure out a way to pack their sets with the most "rookie" cards. To me, that's the appeal of vintage minor league cards of future major leaguers. They were humbly produced cards of seemingly non-descript players who went on to greatness.
So, for me, I'll take a "first card" over a "first major league card" of any vintage player. Personally, I think they should be called "rookie cards" because that is the label that was traditionally applied to a player's first card before the 1990s nonsense. But if that word has been hijacked, I guess I don't really care.