Imagine owning a toy manufacturing company and never going out to toy stores or toy fairs to listen to what kids are saying about their toys... If you ask me, that's either arrogant, clueless or both.
The S&M decks are one of their biggest cash cow, so why should they spend so much effort redesigning them when they can just swap the colors and still sell the same amount? Yes, that probably makes them arrogant, but why should they care when they can laugh all the way to the bank. I'm not trying to defend them, just applying my typical cynicism.
I prefer to think of S&M as the goose that's laying the golden eggs. It's only a matter of time before the eggs stop coming, before people figure out the hype and get tired of shelling out cash to them. Their S&M cards are good, but they're hardly the Holy Grail of card design, and the color change stuff is both lazy of them and boring to us. But they're on the hook for maybe a half-dozen releases around late fall/early winter, and they're selling at a much slower pace than any of the S&M releases - even when they cut the production run shorter. Their looking at their "flagship" product to save the day.
But that's not my main point.
Imagine you own a magic store. Customers come in all day, browsing, buying, trying out new tricks on each other. But you never see them unless they're plunking down the cash. You and your register are in a booth, shrouded and insulated from the rest of the store. If a customer talks to you directly, you listen - but anything they say outside of your booth, you never hear it and aren't interested in hearing it. I can practically hear some Wizard of Oz character standing at the booth door, saying "Nobody gets to see the Wizard, no one, no how!"
That makes no sense. They don't hear the pulse of their customers (and potential customers). Designers and employees of some decent-sized card/magic/cardistry companies pop in here all the time, listening to what we're saying, hearing that pulse. Some even chime in, and not only on topics about their own products.
I'm putting this argument to bed by saying, "That is NOT how I would run an Internet-based, Internet-dependent business in this day and age."
