I could not agree more.  Add to this the fact that NGC now assigns more registry points to the meaningless EARLY and FIRST RELEASES designations and you have what is clearly just a colossal money extraction scheme.  The concept that a 69/70 graded coin with the words "EARLY RELEASES" on its label is worth more registry points than an identical piece without them is insulting and, as another commenter so correctly observed, "demeaning to the hobby."  Following this logic, why don't Major League Baseball and the National Football League award more points for runs or touchdowns achieved within, say, the first 30 minutes of the game?  After all, those scoring events occurred first, when the players were fresh...

what is so screwed up about the whole situation is that there is really no difference between the first strikes off the first sets (yes, plural, as in many) of dies. I don't know how many tokens (yes, these are not coins in any honest sense and will never circulate officially) they can get out of a die before stresses appear or details disappear but my guess is they go through several hundred dies. If this is true, then there are 'early strikes' from EVERY die, making the whole concept faulty.

If I got a late strike from a die used during the 'early strikes' period it would be far inferior to the first ingots off any die after that striking period, so IF I was presented with two coins- one lacking full detail and with less than outstanding luster and surfaces from a 'first strike' and the other a fully struck piece with perfect luster and surfaces from a brand new set of dies used after the 'first strike' period, my obvious choice would be the nicer coin. Why are people fooled into buying a label instead of the coin that they are supposedly collecting?

P.T. Barnum said it right- there's a sucker born every moment. What Barnum never saw coming was supercorp players who could fool large numbers of people into believing a common turd was a gem to be cherished. Shame on all the fools who bought into and helped them perpetuate the scam...