[mrreality68]

My un- educated thought on this is that

A lot of new Money is coming in from people or organizations that are looking to diversify their investments and think collectibles specifically cards in this case are are big opportunity and they read about it.

But since they are uneducated in the baseball collectible realm they rely on things they can quantify and analyze.

So they see graded cards as that means since they can research what past cards in different grades went for and bid/buy accordingly. And as things trend up they can determine/guess what they think the upward trend is and bid in that trend range

Takes away from the collectors and makes it harder to collect what we want but it also increase the value of what we have prior the upwards trends and allows mean to hold or to flip it make a profit and do with that as we like