[RiceBondsMntna2Young]

This is just through my lens as a Bonds collector...but I think the reason for those fine - often imaginary - differences in high grades is overproduction since the 80s. I've seen print run estimates of 7M for the '87 Bonds Topps RC. People my age and younger needed a way to squint out (virtually) imperceptible conditions in order to stratify. As collectors, we've always obsessed about condition. The PSA registry sent this predisposition into overdrive. Now there was a numerical grade that could separate the haves and have-nots on a public database. An irrational fixation on centering to the exclusion of every other subgrade category either exacerbated or flourished as a result of this new way of ranking cards by condition, and ranking collector by his ratios of 10s. To be fair, it's the one thing that can be quantifiably assessed on a card, measure in pixels if you like. In a sea of Bonds RC, at least a collector can accurately say his card is in the 99th percentile of centering of those that have been graded.

My grasp of the low end of the PSA grading scale in vintage isn't as personal. What I saw when I attended the National last year was eye opening though. There are much more perceptible differences in condition at the low end of the scale. Registration, fading, surface damage, staining, printing flaws, type of edge wear, paper loss, etc, all varied, sometimes vastly. There's no way to account for this on a number line, even if we did stagger the intervals more "evenly." But the dominant factor separating old cards remained centering. I suspect the decision was made by PSA and the like, and pretty much every collector followed. There's no way other way to turn a qualitative assessment into a quantitative metric, so that's what the powers that be went with. And almost an entire industry followed.

We've always wanted to know whose card is nicer. Like two friends running up to a lunch monitor on the playground, we asked PSA to decide who wins. And that's how we let a company bilk us collectively for millions.