I came into the game during 4th Edition/Fallen Empires and missed out on all of the older cards. Standard wasn't a format yet and even parks of The Dark were well above MSRP. When Chronicles came out there was definitely a divide of sorts between younger/newer players and the people who had been playing at the beginning. Having City of Brass, Ernham Djinn, Carrion Ants, the Elder Dragons, Dakkon Blackblade, Sol'kanar the Swamp King, etc. all show up in a massively printed set and with white borders did crush the prices of the original cards. I can understand people being concerned that WotC could just as easily do that with even more expensive cards. The collectible nature of the game is a big part of the attraction for some players. People like trading. There's a secondary market to consider.
But most of the people that were unhappy with Chronicles left the game anyway not long after the introduction of Standard, specifically when 4th Edition, Chronicles, Fallen Empires, Ice Age, and Homelands all rotated out simultaneously and Standard became Mirage, Visions, Weatherlight, Tempest, and a core set. Fifth edition had removed Serra Angel, Sengir Vampire, Shivan Dragon, Swords to Plowshares, and a bunch more ironic cards and replaced them with poop further alienating older players. Standard was what everyone had cards for and what the bulk of the players were playing. The older players weren't too keen on needing to constantly keep up with buying new sets and left the game. The Reserved List was in place but it didn't mean all that much. Standard was the format with all the support and general interest in Vintage was low. The Reserved List also was updated for no real gain at a couple different points. Why are Fallen Empires cards on the Reserved List? If you go through set by set from Fallen Empires to Urza's Destiny it's all just so much crap. It's like they added cards just to add cards.
Someone made a decision that this card would never be reprinted. Homelands was heavily printed, the card never saw play, never had value, was never collectible, and if you are looking for a white enchantment that buffs your dudes you've got ten better options. Wizards has also demonstrated that the Reserved List can be circumvented. Fork is on the reserved list but they made Reverberate which is
almostthe identical card is functionally identical in almost all cases.
Now the game's
hugeand what started out a fairly reasonable policy is now a set of handcuffs. There are more people than ever that are at least somewhat interested in playing the older formats but the limited supply of certain cards makes that prohibitive. I think WotC's plan is to just ride things out a few more years and let Modern slowly push out formats they can't ever print cards for. At some point they can do something like reintroduce Extended and just pretend there's only Modern, Standard, and <Insert New Format Here>. There's also always the outside chance that a brand new Hasbro CEO decides to just jettison entire fucking thing and crank up the printing press. What's going to fuck all that up is counterfeiting. The prices of some cards have grown so high that turning lead into gold looks like amateur hour. Eventually we're going to get fakes that are indistinguishable from the real thing and that is going to force WotC's hand. Hell, they don't even need to be perfect. They just need to be good enough to wreck up the secondary market and erode consumer confidence.
Personally I think that kicking the dual lands off the Reserved List as a one time only thing makes the most sense for the game. If optimal mana bases in Legacy were not prohibitively expensive (and effectively capped as there's just flat out only so many copies of Tundra or Volcanic Island in existence) I think that format could really be fucking massive with a great deal of depth. Never printing Moxes again is fine. The ones on MTGO look like shit proxies anyway. It's really only the duals that have a stifling effect on the game. The rest of it is pretty much whatever.
