I am not sure how you drew the conclusion I equated swill to quality. Also, I don't see boxes selling for $50 each anywhere sans sketches, are they even fetching $20? We have always used swill to refer to commonness and low priced items, series 5 original is exactly that.
I was talking about whether or not people would buy real boxes, not sketch-stripped leavings.
As it has been for awhile, my point in calling it swill is to underscore the fact that as long as sketches drive certain people to purchase hundreds of boxes, the other material will be worthless, and so many who would have participated in buying the release in a conventional way will feel economically obliged to simply pick it all up cheaply. I enjoyed buying boxes for the first few ANS sets (even though I wasn't in love with the actual stickers most of the time) because it was at least vaguely similar to the old days. I went to Target and Walmart and looked for packs and boxes. It was kind of fun sometimes.
As soon as golds and sketches came into the picture, that was it. Everything else was dirt cheap and doing things the old fashioned way was pointless. Kind of ironic that "Old School" (as attractive as the sets have been) have had a hand in killing the old school feel.
And if 5th series sets are swill now, it's because they were in extreme demand 40 years ago, and less so now. They weren't produced to be swill.
