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I have to admit, I hardly ever think about how long a particular part color has been retired or what the BrickLink price is except when I’m ordering parts, and often wouldn’t even realize a part in a new set had been absent from sets for a long time unless somebody brought it up.
But seeing a recolor I don’t remember EVER seeing in sets or MOCs before tends to get me much more excited. So it’s possible that when designers want to throw parts into a set for fanservice reasons, they prefer those kinds of parts that will excite and surprise everyone, not just people who have been keenly watching a particular older part’s price on BrickLink.
That said, there could also be other reasons. It’s also possible that however many of that 1x2 with groove mold LEGO actually has in their factories are already in use pretty much full-time stamping out neutral colors like white and grey for City and Star Wars sets, and more whimsical colors for Minecraft animals, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities for recolors that aren’t essential for a particular subject.
Additionally, since the masonry brick didn’t exist when Green Grocer and Pet Shop came out, maybe it’s now being used in a lot of the sorts of decorative applications that the brick with groove and the grille brick were often preferred for before its introduction.
This is a very fair point. I still have to think designers enjoy bringing back an older now expensive piece when they can just to throw AFOLs a special bone here and there :) that said, if we didn't get a sand green 1x8 in the ocean monument swt, I dont know when we ever will.
I think the point is that people who want to BL a replica of GG want the EXACT pieces that came with the set.
I know Mega Bloks/Construx managed to create somewhat decent looking marbled bricks to add camo patterns to some of their Halo and Call of Duty sets, but then, they don't really have as much of a reputation for smooth, consistent colors as LEGO in the first place. It's a tough battle to create color variations that look random or uneven that people won't associate with inconsistent quality control. I was just saying earlier in a Facebook thread that I suspect that's part of the reason LEGO dropped their Light Stone Grey/Very Light Bluish Gray color that was one of the main colors for their Mindstorms NXT sets… considering how many people who didn't realize at first that it wasn't "LEGO white", a lot of those who did notice might have mistaken it for a quality defect rather than its own discrete color.
I jest I jest!