[size=12]OK, but for sake of argument, if the market drops both on and off of e-bay and people start paying close to 5th edition blue book price (the one revised in 2013, mind you,) does the price guide suddenly become less outdated just because the pendulum has swung yet again?
I'm not saying you're wrong, either. You've got a compelling hypothesis, and you back it up with logical observations. As you've pointed out, a lot of people must interpret things the way you're interpreting them, because somebody (several somebodies) keeps placing all these bids at sales. But I still say it's the difference between worth vs. trend. If, in five years or so, the average informed cast iron collector is still willing to pay well above blue book prices for common and uncommon pieces of good or even pristine quality, I'll be more willing to say that it's time to put the blue book to bed. But if this is just a temporary seller's market right now, then I'm inclined to say that the blue book is still a good indicator of worth independent of trend.
Maybe I'm bullheaded, but if I'm at an auction and they sell ten Large Block Smooth #8 pans, and ten people at the sale bid each one of them up to $70, I don't go home convinced that that very common pan is suddenly worth $70, I just go home convinced that cast iron is trending pretty high at the moment.
And let's face it, neither e-bay, with its global audience, nor a live auction that draws a crowd of several hundred bidders, can weed out those individuals whom my father would probably say have "more dollars than sense." As long as any given sale has two bidders with deep pockets and big dreams, there's no telling how high things will go. How do you decide who's an outlier and who's just trying to outbid one?[/size]