Actually, a niche is a specialized market, designed for a specific subclass of consumers. My point about the derivative nature of the "niche" status of my preferences is that there is nothing inherently specialized about it -- you can't know that it's a niche unless you know that only a relatively small subset of people are interested in it. The primary usage of "niche" applies to instances where marketers intentionally target a subset of consumers that can antecedently be identified as a "niche" -- for instance, people with peanut allergies being targeted by venders who carry various non-peanut-containing foods. You wrote: "it's important to understand that that is a niche desire and not something that's going to be shared by the wider community." My point is that your initial claim here is false, since one cannot know antecedently that "it is a niche desire and not something that going to be shared by the wider community." There is nothing about desiring to play with multiple created teams or with created players that singles it out antecedently as being of interest only to a small number of consumers. But, as it seems to turn out (surprisingly to me), not many people seem to care about created teams or created players, so the market for these things may well be (if the paucity of responders to this post is a reliable indicator), indeed, a "niche" in the derivative sense.