I took a run at the dataset to see what it suggests.
The card with the lowest population is Bob Roselli at 39. The most for a common (obviously, people grade HOFers more and we lose the reasonably fair comparison if we look at Mickey Mantle vs. a guy like Roselli) is Ray Narleski at 89. Just over double. There's a few in the low 40's, a lot in the 50's, 60's and 70's. There is natural fluctuation over commons known to have the same print run in all sets, and this is well within what I postulated above; some are DP's on the sheet because it's an 80 card series on a 110 half sheet. The same effect can be seen on the gray backs (Roselli 486, Narleski 672 for example; in higher populations the % disparity becomes smaller and smaller), because it's sheet would be the same as series 3 and 4 shown above. The cards with less white backs also have less gray backs in the pop report; we can figure out which ones were likely the cards on the DP'd rows used to fill out the sheet even without having one. There are not actual SP's, just some DP's as we would expect and are also present on the gray backs.
This recent market notion, that there are some cards much tougher than others and deserving of huge premiums, is not supported by the evidence. It is contradictory to the dataset and what common sense and deductive logic would tell us about the sheet and printing. If people want to pay 20x for standard print run row cards would normally go for in Topps sets, my DM's and PayPal are open.
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