High end sets - the thorn in the player collector's side?

Being a player collector, I want to collect as many of my chosen player’s cards as possible. For many players, this would be a pretty much impossible task that would be take forever, and cost an arm and a leg. For instance, searching all sets for Alex Rodriguez on beckett.com brings up a whopping 10681 items. Since A-Rod is such a superstar, this is not really unexpected. He is probably in just about every insert set since 1995, and of course, Topps gave him a whole 500+ cards last year with their road to 500 set.

Since I am neither a billionaire, or a Yankees fan, I don’t bother with him. But, I still have favorite players. Take Kevin Kouzmanoff. He might not have the stardom or the power that A-Rod has, but he had a hot bat in the minors, hit a grandslam in his first MLB at bat, and had a good run late in 07 - right about when I was getting interested in cards again.

Back in August 2007, beckett.com showed the Kouz as having about 250 cards. Today, there are 421 of them. 98 of the extras are found in the UD Exquisite Collection Rookie Signatures set which retails for about $300US. Are they 98 exciting different variations? Are they a continuity set, or a sub set? No. They are boring parallels.

Take for instance the Exquisite Ensembles tri-signed card. You have the 'normal' card numbered to 35 and shown below:
Then you have the parallel numbered to 3:

Aside from the not-so-good pic, there isnt much difference is there?

And then of course the is the mandatory 1 of 1 of the same card. (no scan available as i havent seen it pop up on ebay yet)

This kind of annoys me. Essentially these are the same card, with the only difference being a serial number added by UD.

Next up we have the patch cards:

Numbered to 199

Numbered to 99

And....numbered to 25 (looking at $300US for this baby).

While there are some noticeable differences in these cards, the artificial rareness is just insane. The fact that people will pay significantly more for these short numbered parallels really annoys me, and I will be surprised if these cards maintain that sort of value over time. Especially when in the last ten years there have been more than 400,000 memorabilia cards made!

Another annoyance is when UD put 'regular players' (if you want to call them that) on the same card as superstars. Take for instance the Ripken All Rookie set:

This card, featuring Hall-of-Famer Cal Ripken Jr, and a heck-of-a-long-way-from-being-a-hall-of-famer Kevin Kouzmanoff, and numbered to 8, recently went for more than $200 on ebay! This is a real kick in the teeth Kouzmanoff collectors. How could we justify spending more than $200 for that card? It is very difficult. Ripken collectors (of which there are probably many many more, and therefore statistically more likely to include people willing to pay big bucks for this sort of thing) would probably not be all that enamoured by this sort of card. However, those completists out there would cough up anyway.

This sort manufactured rarity and importance is a real shame (and a sham!). I dont see why the card companies do things this way. I guess they want to make sure that people who bust expensive product always get something with some sort of re-sale-ability. But surely there has to be a better way?