Hasbro can do what it wants, and I suppose this is just an acknowledgment of the market segment that those who do pay attention to the AFA represents, but what the AFA does represent in the toy collecting world is something that I find pretty repugnant. Like Zedhatch said -- free them from their plastic prisons!
For whatever reason, I was recently thinking of a line I read about comic books one time. "Yeah, all of these talented creators work their butts off to come up with interesting characters and dynamic stories, and find artists to present these tales in as much four-color detail as possible, just so you can seal the thing away for fifty years and never read it!"
Work that around a bit for action figures -- All these talented designers and sculptors get together to create interesting characters or match them to their movie likenesses, come up with an overall design for the figure that hopefully allows for as much articulation as possible while being reasonably unobtrusive in the design whenever possible, hire workers to mold, paint, and assemble the figures, give them interesting accessories -- just so you can leave them in their packages and never bend a single point of movement just so they're "worth more"...
