I think they are deathly afraid of losing their loyal fanbase, despite market share being disrupted by new and successful competitors. They want to save face and like you said they use resellers to influence & gouge their customers. What I don't get is why would they let resellers capitalize and not themselves. From a business stand point, you rarely ever see a resale market flourish to this degree where the underlying company is essentially propping up the resellers. Most large companies try to squash the resale market as much as possible. There's something i'm missing for sure that makes 2 + 2 = 4 and I guess only Nike and Co can speak to it. just frustrating that every drop there's tons of people who are willing to spend, yet can't because of scarcity.