It's one of the two evils isn't it?
Luckily I think i live in an area where this doesn't happen so much, at least not in my town.
On the one hand you have a well known way of deterring scalpers from making money, on the other hand you have a problem if it effects collectors.
Because every collector wants something different its hard to find a balance, I still blame the manufacturer for 2 reasons.
1. They get greedy with the item price from the outset, in todays market more so as most countries are supposed to be in a recession and unemployment seems to be very high.
2. By making 'rare' limited run figures it only makes people outside of the hobby greedier. They find the figure thats most sought after and buy as many as they can.
To a degree if your in it for the collecting its fine and it really is fun to find the rare or chase figure (i've done this myself with Sota Street Fighter) but this obviously has a knock on effect in terms of price hiking on other collectors. In most cases i'm not bothered about the packaging either but that's just my own humble opinion, I know plenty out there that are very specific when it comes to packaging defects.
The solution would be to make the same number of figures for each character, but the manufacturer knows in advance which figure they'd need to produce more of? Why is it no matter what happens theres never ever enough army builders to go round? Yet they always make trillions of a 'one character' figure like duke or baroness.
I sometimes think the people at these major toy manufacturers don't know anything about the product they are selling and are more interested in the stock profits on the market, which is most likely the case. They are businessmen after all.
*rant over*