My antipathy towards modern cards is due to the fact that they depend on manufactured scarcity to have a market. It's made buying baseball cards basically into buying lotto tickets. And I don't buy those either.
Another (related) problem, which really connects modern cards to the 80s-90s period, is that cards are manufactured specifically to be collectibles. The first sign that this was a thing was when you could buy complete sets straight from the manufacturer (or the retailer). Vintage cards were children's toys, these aren't. One of the charms of buying a '33 Goudey is in thinking about how somebody's dad indulged his son with a penny to buy a pack of gum - even though they were stuck in the midst of the Depression - and that this card may have been that kid's prize possession. When you buy a modern card, you don't get that. Rather, you get to think about how the marketing department determined that adding more foil would appeal to middle aged men hoping to turn a profit on baseball cards, thereby pushing the demand curve on their product a little further to the right.
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