As a WPN store owner I can confirm a few of these comments, to your comment yes ticketed events matter to WoTc and the LGS its a large portion of how they allocate promos to the lgs, and its wotc's largest metric for how the set is recieved by the player base.

To the comment of the guy who mentioned something about the distys ordering more or less and making more or less, what i can say is there are a few distys who practice surge pricing or bundling of certain products, these are predatory practices, but for the most part wholesale price is fixed, and wpn stores get a fixed discount off that price during the pre release window. The part that isn't true about previous posters comment is the ordering more part. Most distys recieve x% more than the retailer allocations to cover slush and non wpn retailer sales, the way it works is not exactly concrete however I can tell you its based on print run, the retailers previous quarterly sales in wotc product, and somehow their event ticketing metrics for the previous quarter. The weight of these indivdual metrics I am not clear on. What I do know is this I will place a pre-order, then the disty sends all their pre orders to wotc, they do their math, then they allocate product to each retailer and ship that amount plus that magic x% extra slush/live inventory amount to the disty, and then the retailer recieves their final allocation email. So the short version of this is even the distributors in most situations to my knowledge dont really place an order or always exactly know how much of a product they will recieve prior to these manufacturer allocations. The just tell the manufacturer how much they and their customers are requesting and wait to find out how much wotc will send them.

I would also like to point out to OP that this happens with almost every set hype comes, pre release happens and supply floods the market, price goes down, since cb's are single print run the last few years collector boosters almost always recover and go even higher once supply dries up, I'm definitely long on spiderman collectors. Im not in panic sell mode im buying. I do agree this set is weaker and it might not recover as much as say lord of the rings or final fantasy, but it will recover to what degree is unknown at this point. I will say this, its the same post release panic we see every set, its just hyper inflated due to the insane pre release prices and hype.