Loved your comment but…
I have a nice Ken Griffey Jr. collection so I had to point out that his rookie year was 1989 (Upper Deck). He was the best player, drug free, of that generation.
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The appeal to OC and MC cards in TCGs comes from the saturation of the cards and the desire to own something unique.
In sports collecting where there’s real scarcity with autos and variants people want perfect cards.
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This x100.
Not sure why I wrote rookie… his ‘89 upper deck rookie is imprinted on my mind. 
and I agree.
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Coming in late here, but I’m one of those fools that goes after miscuts lol. Figured I would add my thoughts.
Using a quote from Zack, “miscuts and other sorts of errors are an outlet to keep collecting.” Let’s say you have every version of a card, but you don’t want to stop collecting. Errors and OCs are a great way to keep the hobby alive. I finished all the English tcg sets, and I always had a love for errors simply because they weren’t meant to happen. Several years down the road, I’ve amassed a huge number of extreme miscuts. While Nintendo era much more often produces OC cards today than wotc, or even old ex era Nintendo, going after the drastic miscuts with parts of another card are what really get me excited. The more severe the miscut, the more rare/expensive/valuable it will be. Now it should also be clear that I’m not in this area for investing, as Gary oriented the conversation from the start. Heck, I don’t even grade my miscuts in the first place. They’re already unique cards enough for me, and I don’t want anyone staring at numbers like grades or prices on them. It should be about the uniqueness of the card and nothing else. Moreover, psa would likely not give some of them the qualifiers and would just result in a low grade. If errors never end up being worth anything, that’s fine with me. I plan on keeping mine and never selling. But there’s going to remain a small group of error collectors that are passionate about them, and they’ll continue to keep this little corner of the hobby alive with me.
Also, I love what budget said about there being real scarcity in other card markets. Scott said himself in one of his recent videos that most Pokémon cards can be bought right now for $20 or less. While this is also true for other markets, the autos and patches and such are so much rarer than anything Pokémon puts out for us collectors to go after. The only thing they are doing to make it more of a challenge is upping the number of promos and cards per set lol.
— Joe
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WOTC qualifiers are very hard to find because PSA rarely hands them out - even in cases when they clearly deserve it. This has created a niche within the hobby. Pokemon is all about getting that hard to find, rare card. That has carried over into errors and variants (gray stamp), so it only makes sense that it carries into qualifiers too.