Market flooding
FWIW, I think a great deal of blame is placed at the feet of the card companies and the major league sports and unions that licensed too many products. They killed the golden goose by overfeeding it.
When sports card collecting boomed (about when Topps stopped being the only legit choice, in the early 1980s), cards became innovative and interesting and visually appealing. Buyers (still mostly kids) appreciated the competitive look of the new manufacturers' products. When one or two experimented with short-subsets, insert cards, redemption cards, etc., collecting became a lottery (I don't care what that idiot judge in the midwest (?) said -- kids ripped open packs looking for the valuable insert cards, not to find the #377 card they need to finish their sets; it was gambling, pure and simple).
Once buying and searching packs, boxes, cases, became a money-making proposition, kids got squeezed out physically and monetarily. And then there were just too many cards to collect. I heard a stat a while back that I think is illustrative: in 1955 There was one mainstream Mickey Mantle card. In 1997 there were 135 Mantle cards issued by various manufacturers, all in subsets, chase cards, etc. The packs became valuable, and then were priced accordingly, even if value was generated by way of a manufactured scarcity (such as the new Sport Kings cards).
The market got overheated, flooded, and expensive, and kids could no longer keep up with the dealers who would buy up and break cases to find chase cards, then sell them for more than the cases were sold for. Point in illustration: I remember very clearly a dealer friend breaking cases of some basketball card to find the "insert" Shaq & Jabbar card (and he knew how to count the boxes down from the top to find the right box). The rest of the case was, essentially, trash, so he pretty much handed it out like candy. The Shaq card sold for more than he spent on the case. I know there are many more examples of this.
So I say #5, FWIW.
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