Jeremiah, I'm always sorry to see anyone start a thread with a "please don't flame me statement". I hope at BPNet we've grown enough to debate with reason and respect so you should feel comfortable introducing a topic like this.

As far as snakes being promoted as "breeder quality" remember this isn't a hobby/breeding business that has breed standards like the purebred dog world does. We do to some degree have them but they aren't written in stone like the dog world is. A person can breed a pastel for instance and call it whatever they want as far as quality goes as a marketing tool. It's pretty much up to the buyer to decide if that's the particular look in a pastel that they want.

Part of the buying decision for my husband and I when we look at any snake is the look of the snake but also the "quality" of it is expressed for us anyway, in the person that bred it. That might mean a big breeder or a small breeder. For us it's about trusting our source for our foundation breeders as being people of quality as much as they produce snakes of quality.

Snakes as well, are so unique it's hard to set a particular standard. No normal looks exactly like any other normal when it comes to shade, pattern, etc. I can visually ID every normal I have at a glance based on their specific look. Every morph is as unique as you've likely already seen looking through snakes for sale. In the end it's up to the individual to decide what snake and what breeder they feel fits their specific needs or plans for their collection, at least in my opinion. That does require a lot of smarts on the buyer's part and a lot of research but in that I can't image it's much different than the purebred dog world.