To me, what's exciting about breeding these animals (aside from the sheer "gee whiz" geeky fun of it ) is the prospect of potentially producing something really neato.

That could be a multi-gene combo, and most of the time, for most of us, it probably is. However, it could also be an improvement on a single-gene. For example, this year I bred my bumblebee male to a normal, but very reduced-pattern, female in an attempt to reduce the pattern of my bee line even more.

For some people, the single-genes are boring and it's the prospect of producing a new combo that's the real fun part. However, there is still a lot of value in breeding to carefully selected normal females to improve the appearance of your single-gene components.

I agree with you, however, that taking single-gene (or even multi-gene) males and breeding them to a whole bunch of normal females just to pump out babies for re-sale is pretty boring. I'm not going to fault or demonize those who do it so long as the animals are well-cared for and healthy, but it certainly doesn't jive with my motivations for breeding.