Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Heritage

I have this love / hate relationship with Heritage baseball. It's akin to a Jeckyll / Hyde scenario. There's that sweet feeling of opening packs, looking at cards, sorting them, building the set.
Then there's the harsh reality of needless short prints, stupid gimmicks, and questionable parallels and inserts.

Topps has nailed the card stock with Heritage. They should do away with that plasticky, glossy crap that they use on the base set and use this. Can you imagine the bliss?
But too many collectors want that, so Topps will never do it.

Since I already started building the flagship set, and I still haven't finished any other Heritage sets, combined with my ambivalence of the '66 set itself, I was going to forgo starting this year's Heritage offering.
Still, I had to buy a few packs, right?

There was a box open on the shelf at the last trade night at one of my local shops. They opened two packs, and pulled the shiny purple parallels in each pack. Hot box! Wooo!!!!

Um. No.

They then pulled the box off the shelf for store use and opened another box for pack sales.

wow.

Not cool.

Moving on.....

Out of the new box, I took the top three packs. They felt good. Clean. Crisp. Gently tearing open the first pack of this new box there is this smiling back at me.

One last hurrah.

Maybe I will chase this set, but I doubt it. At least, not for awhile. I can't find many trade partners for flagship, so I figure Heritage would be doubly tough.
Besides, what card can I pull that will be better than this?