I don't have a dog in the fight; I'm not into LEs or reissues. I did read the NYT article though and found a couple of items interesting. First Hublot's production numbers. My response was "Well, don't charge so much for ugly watches and maybe you'll sell a few more".
The second thing was this quote from Julien Tornare, the Zenith CEO:
“Secondhand was ‘the gray market’ and it was dirty and no one wanted to hear about it,” he continued. “Now, we’re all thinking about how we do it and how we get our part of the pie, because it’s big business.”
Does that man understand what he's talking about? It's long been a business concept of capturing profit across all parts of the price/demand curve (Southwest selling discount seats to early buyers, Toyota offering the Scion line) but the concept has been heresy in the watch business. It's been speculated that Richmont destroyed something like $200 million worth of watches in 2018 just to keep them away from the GM.
Interesting read, glad I waded through this thread (and I have nothing to do at work right now).