My two cents on eBay. I agree the over priced booster boxes at 175$ and individual boosters at 8$ are a rip off. As well as the over priced legendaries. But some of the recents card lots are really not that bad of deal. Let's assume the retail cost of a rare is 3$. This I believe is the retail cost of a booster. Forget about demand and desirability of a card for this discussion. So the current rare set on eBay is 175$ with shipping for 43 cards. This is roughly 4$ per card. One would be hard pressed to buy 43 individual boosters and be guaranteed to get exactly one of every rare. It took be at least 3 full booster boxes totaling over 300$ to get a completed set of rares.
To me $175 doesn't sound to bad.