When it comes to reproductions of vintage and antique decks, it's less like looking at a Van Gogh poster and comparing it to the original, more like looking at a rare artist's print from hundreds of years ago and seeing a new print made. A Van Gogh painting has lots of subtle elements in the paint, the brushstrokes, etc. that reproduce poorly when copied in a poster (typically a low-end print of a photograph of the painting). But comparing an antique print with a modern reproduction is a lot more like comparing apples to apples when it comes to playing cards - and you have the added benefit of actually being able to use the newer version without any thought of ruining a rare, vintage or antique piece of art.
BTW: when it comes to cover bands, there are cover bands and there are COVER BANDS. Many cover bands are pale imitations of the original, but some come exceptionally close and others can actually even EXCEED the original artists, though I'll grant you that it's terribly uncommon. It falls under the category of "don't judge a book (or a band) by its cover..."
Now, as far as "decks I'd like to see come to market..." Well, if I knew that, I'd be producing them myself!
There are as many types of collectors as there are decks out there. That's part of why there's been such an explosion of custom decks out there. A number of them are "me, too" designs made by people looking to cash in on a trend by making poor-man's versions of someone else's work, but many of them are very original and attractive in their own right. Personally, I want to see ALL the types of decks you mentioned flourishing - it's the sign of a very healthy marketplace!
As a magician, I like decks that have a certain "cool factor" to them - often decks that have a cool back design, but are fairly standard in the faces, perhaps with the exception of slight differences in colors used, such as a deeper red like the type used in casino decks or with metallic inks on the court card character clothing. But the one thing I lament the most is that the vast majority of the best designs I've seen are all limited editions, never to be reprinted again - it's difficult to spread the love of custom decks to a larger market when there's only a few hundred or a few thousand decks of any given deck in existence. Look at it just on the scale of a US-only marketplace: if I make a deck and only print 4,000 of them, all sold in the US (approximate population of 400,000,000, that means there's a maximum 0.00025% chance that any one person will ever get to own one. That chance plummets if people buy more than one deck, which many people do, though not the majority of the market. On a global scale, with approximately 7,000,000,000, the chance goes so low, that a maximum of only one in every 1,750,000 people will ever own that deck.
So might gloat over the rarity of such a deck, but ALL the collectible decks out there are similarly as rare to each other. Over time, the decks will be opened, used, worn out, traded, lost, destroyed in fire or flood, etc. and become all that much more scarce - but such scarcity makes it a very limited art form in terms of public exposure. There might only be one "Starry Night" by Van Gogh (or pick any other rare, famous and popular work of art), but there's thousands upon thousands (perhaps even millions) of prints and posters and postcards and other images of that work, so while you may never get to own the original, you can certainly get a hold of a reproduction at an affordable price to have in your home. Joe Designer's custom deck with a print run in the low four figures won't make it anywhere near that level of worldwide popularity because most of the world won't even know it exists. Even worse, because of the scarcity of the deck and the hoarding nature of most collectors (it's not a bad thing, it's just the nature of collecting in general), many if not most of those decks will be squirreled away in boxes and tucked into the backs of closets, never even seeing the light of day, never mind being enjoyed by the world at large.
As much as I love having rare decks and cool designs, I love breaking them out and playing with them as well, showing them to my friends and family, having a spirited card game at a table together and having a good time. They don't take anywhere near as good care with them as I do, but the tradeoff in terms of the experience can't be measured or quantified.
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