[Smarti5051]

Seems like a lot of words used to justify alterations be accepted in a hobby which specifically looks down on alterations. If you repair a car in a bad accident to be "as good as new," does that mean it was never in a crash and you can advertise it as such? Or can you just roll back the number on the odometer to erase 100,000 miles if the car visually looks good? At the end of the day, if the person purchasing the card would want to know about an alteration and you do your job so well that they can't detect the alteration, that is and always will be fraud if it is not disclosed. Your efforts to try and find common ground will be impossible, because every argument you make tries to justify hiding a fact that the buyer (and collecting community) believes is material.

I also think your argument that touching a card without gloves "alters" the card actually cuts against your central premise. The point of assessing condition is to see what the current state of the card is after a myriad of "challenges" the card has (or could have) faced over its lifetime. From printing defects, centering, gum and wax stains, and packaging at the supplier, to dings to the corners from shipping/stocking, to who is opening and how much care they have treated the card with when they open the pack and store the card. The older the card, the more impressive a higher grade example. This is what gives the card and grade its scarcity. If a card got to skip all of these challenges and was simply created after the fact to be pristine, it is the equivalent of a lab made diamond and the hobby values it as such, unless a fraudster omits the material information in a transaction.