Prices will drop as they finish off the demand and have excess capacity. the NJ facility is coming online soon and that will increase capacity even more. They appear to be adopting demand-based pricing, like an airline or a LV casino hotel. TPGs are businesses; they aim to make money. You'd have to be an idiot to price your services at $10 when you can readily get $30. I am seriously contemplating paying $100 a card (
) to have a half dozen raw cards done at PSA. They've gone through the roof and I want to cash out; it just makes sense to spend $100 per to lock in the potential profit.
As for the nature of the game, expensive card collecting, like art collecting, is a wealthy person's hobby now. I am in on some of it only because I got the cards decades ago. I could not afford today to buy what I have, which is one reason I won't part with it easily. Also why I got into boxing and other sports and even non-sports about 20 years ago: priced out of the baseball cards I wanted to collect. Except for Pele cards and a few scattered cards in other sports (Jack Johnson boxing cards), that stuff is still very reasonable.