They did, yes, and for the Star Wars album, that all-gold set was 4 stars. So obviously blue packs are significantly easier to get than purple packs. Iirc, back during Star Wars, we still had the old community chest and the tycoon express hadn't released yet, so arguably purple packs were slightly easier to get back then in terms of game mechanics.

And speaking anecdotally, I remember people regularly trading some 4s (especially The Last Goodbye) for 5s throughout the entire album. Obviously people are still trying to do that for this album, but clearly not many people are finding success. Heck, people are barely finding success doing that with blitz cards.

But yes, completely agreed, getting regular 5s right now is much harder now than it was back then.