>>10684425Here's my hot take that's probably mostly projection; its easy, all you need to make a grail is a crunch and nostalgia.
A few years ago I started going after the remaining Might Max variants I was missing. They went for a few pounds more than the retail varieties and I spent around 300 total getting most of em. Over the next year it became apparent that these variants were not coming back into the market and more and more of them were shipping out of the UK to a growing number of international buyers. Listings that had been ignored were getting snapped up. It was time for the crunch. There wasn't enough population in the market to support the collector interest that was rapidly expanding thanks to nostalgia and FOMO pressure. With so few of these items being exchanged absurd new market averages got solidified on ebay which then get used by community sellers and other markets to determine their floor prices.
Interest in a toy often peaks only after its supply dwindles and its associated value changes. Obviously we're raised to associate quality and importance with monetary value when we don't know any better. But even when we seem to know better humans make the obvious mistake and buy something they only became interested in once it had higher associated monetary value or degree of rarity. You could argue that this is all just retroactive cause and effect driven by other qualities. But I think for all the aspects of aesthetic, design, and engineering that we like to attribute with the desire of these "grails" its primarily the totally illogical manipulation of price and availability that makes us the most hungry.
tl;dr I think grails are mostly ego driven. We buy things because they're expensive because it impresses those who don't have the means.
