Very well researched and produced. This took a lot of scans of old brochures, I see.
Love the mention of the "evil" Picard on DS9. I remember looking at these in Targets and going "Where the hell is this episode where this happens?" Still one of my faves on 7th season Canadian cards.
The DS9 Tom Riker, I think, was done that way b/c it was tooled up before the episode aired, but I'm not sure.
Nice mention of Huntsville too. That's where the Tri-fold Borgs were almost being given away. But instead, people were loading up on Scotty and Sulu, thinking they would be big money. Of course, those two were overproduced and almost all stayed on their cards, cause people were putting these away as a "sure thing." The Tri-fold Borg, on the other hands, were just about ignored at Huntsville by collectors. Talked to a guy a few months ago who was there and saw just boxes of them being sold cheaply. Most weren't mint, they had some damage, and as a result there's almost no such thing as a mint Tri-fold Borg now.
The 1701 controversy is pretty well covered -- they were definitely being intercepted at stores by employees. There's even a New York Times article that mentions scalpers putting store employees on payroll and finding the 1701 figures that way.
And yeah, what's up with Chekov being left out of the movies figures lineup? Not that anyone wanted to see more of those TMP pajamas, but still. It felt like that release was planned with a Part II where we'd get more maroon uniform figures from the later films, but it didn't happen.