I meant what I said...the hobby has never been stronger. It's basic economics. Demand is what is driving the high prices. If the demand from hobbyists wasn't there, than card companies/resellers could not charge the prices that some find outrageous.
When going to my LCS, I see plenty of kids collecting cards these days. There are products that Topps/Fanatics puts out specifically for kids at a lower price point. Maybe we as adults don't like those products as much because of the lower quality and/or we choose to focus only on the high-end products that we can't afford. That doesn't mean it isn't happening. And don't kid yourself that people didn't pay attention to the price of a card in the 80s/90s. That era was the start of the "rookie boom" when people would focus just on rookie cards of certain players with the hopes that the player would be good and the value of the cards would skyrocket. Not to mention the thousands of people who thought that baseball cards would fund their retirement.
The reality is that EVERYTHING is more expensive today than it was when we were kids. I'm sure my parents thought that the world would end when the next generation took over, just as I'm sure the generation before them thought the same thing, and so on.
Always looking for baseball variation/error cards and anything Garrett Whitley or Ian Anderson