Howdy Sal,
As always, thank you so much for the community engagement and soliciting of our thoughts and opinions. It's an exceedingly rare opportunity and I hope everyone appreciates it.
First, these knives, exclusives especially, are overwhelmingly just wants for most of us. They are not needs.
My only
personal gripes with exclusives are:
1) Sometimes the configuration I like is being sold at a dealer I don't. But that's my hang up not Spyderco's.
2) I wouldn't want exclusives to inhibit regular production variety. Surely, I don't expect Spyderco to carry Manix 2's in 10 different steels and thirty different color combinations. That's obviously ridiculous. So from that perspective exclusives make sense. But, if say, I don't know orange or red or whatever is "allocated" to a particular dealer so those colors don't or won't in the future ever be available in production models so as to preserve that dealer's exclusivity, that's a bit of a bummer. But, it's a pretty minor one in the grand scheme.
I've never understood the "flipper argument". Yes, flippers are scumbags but if people didn't buy from them, they wouldn't exist. And if people are willing to pay incredibly inflated prices, then so be it. Who am I to tell them how to spend their money? I can think they're nuts, but it's their money. I just don't have to participate. And if I miss out on something, well, that's the choice I've made and all my current knives will still cut stuff really good tomorrow.
Spyderco arguably offers more variety, be it standard production or limited runs, than any cutlery company on the planet. If you didn't, none of this would even be a topic as we'd just have XYZ to choose from, take or leave it. In my opinion, this all really boils down to the want-level of each consumer. Each of us will decide how badly we want something and if that limit is exceeded, then we've made a conscious choice to go without that thing.