I always feel a bit hesitant when people ask questions such as "Why not?" and "Who knows?" when prefaced with a firm "it's essentially meaningless." If it's truly meaningless, why do it at all? "Why nots" jump the gap from a hobby for the pleasure of it, to a game of speculation for profit.
As a hobbyist myself I find that a large number of designations a waste of time. For a company, however, extra designations mean more potential sales or rarities for their product (like the three colors example barryg expressed; it's the same thing).
The "Early Release" or "First Strike®" designations (note that the later is a
registered trademark of PCGS) I find at best comical, and at worst, misleading. Unless the Mint designates "these X number of coins came out of the machines first" with some difference in the design, calling anything "First Strike/Early Release" is dishonest, as there is
no means to tell one apart from the other other than a smudge of ink on a slip of paper. It's a
grading company designation and not (in my opinion) a genuine variety that's worth any sort of acknowledgement.
Grading in and of itself (especially at the higher end of the Sheldon Scale) is still more art than science. Things like PCGS's Plus designation or CGS's Star designation add on additional layers of granularity and opinion that don't tell much qualitatively about the actual coin itself other than how a particular critic thinks about it. Then again, I've been of the opinion that the Sheldon Scale was a bit too granular from the start and as it stands and no one really uses the full 70 breadth of points today (so why would anyone want to *extend* it?).
Anyways, that was more than my
Two Cents, as it were. :-)
To summarize: Yes, some of these special designations are quite silly in my opinion.
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Posted 11/23/2011 9:36 pm
