What's New in the Hobby??

[AbsoluteApril]

Scaleless is still all the rage, and the Banana/Coral Glow thing was an anomaly. With the influence of the sex-linked clutches, and it being an incomplete dominant trait, more people than ever were able to pop out Banana/Coral Glow animals very quickly which saturated the market, causing the "free fall" of the prices. Everyone points to that as their reference when they talk about the bottom falling out of the entire BP market.

Not trying to single you out Eric, just using your post as a reference for my points here.

People have been warning about the bottom falling out for ages (I can find threads on fauna back to 2004* about spiders balls "I think they will keep dropping until they level out in the $2500-$3500 range") with a lot of those types of threads appearing around 2005/2006 and then continuing. Threads about how people are 'dumping their collections' seem to pop up every other year or so with fear of so many people getting out, but there are always new people that get interested to step into their places.
*I don't recall seeing much about that prior to then but I was mostly involved in boas and corn snakes back in the early 2000s

Market crashers are real (it was one or two big breeders that crashed the bananas, they knew what they were doing, getting their bucks and moving on to the 'next big thing'). Any codom/incomplete dom trait is going to fall quickly. Just a few years ago when I got my butter pin, I paid $950. Now I see people selling 2 gene doms for under $150, even under $100. I used to say how if breeders weren't willing to hold off breeding constantly and weren't willing to keep their prices up a bit that they would go the way of the corn snake ($25-75 multi recessive gene morphs). I was speaking about boas at that time but it holds for any 'popular' snake IMO.

Regardless, all of this talk seems to be going away from what the OP was asking, what changed in the last few years? Personally the only other thing I can think of, besides my prior comment about lack of participation in forums due to other social media avenues, are auctions. Snake auctions are a rather new thing that have popped up over the last few years. It can be both good and bad and overall, I've seen a lot where the snakes go for well below market value (not just BPs). Otherwise it seems to be the same old, same old.

and on a personal preference note - scaleless snakes, no thanks!