Why would I pay for something it didn’t need before? Suppose I had paid a professional 3rd party presser to do it before I submitted for grading. People do that all the time do they not?
If it still looked the same inside the slab as when I sent it off and still got the 8.5, I wouldn’t be nearly as aggravated about an 8.5. It’s the knowing that the book was good for at least a 9.0 if people had taken care of it like it’s their job to do so.
I paid $200 for that comic because it had zero spine tics. I submitted that book because it had zero spine tics. It shipped all the way from Canada with zero spine tics. I kept it bagged and boarded with an extra thick, clear acrylic back board inside a top-loader for over a year then removed it, packaged and shipped it with zero spine tics to the one place in the world I figured I could count on people to handle it with the same care that I did.
/rant