You make some good and valid points. I think discussing authenticators is critical to educating the public. There are too many dealers who, as you say, "has no idea what he is doing or who to trust and blindly buys stuff and submits it and relies on the authenticators to know what is good and bad." These dealers are passing the responsibility for authenticity (which should be their primary job as an autograph dealer) to a bunch of corrupt, incompetent idiots.
You say, "One of the most trusted sellers of autographs is a consultant for one of the authenticators. Are you implying that he has no idea what he is doing. Yeah right..."
So what. There are tens of thousands of different celebrities that these companies claim to be able to authenticate. This seller may be familiar with, at most, a couple hundred, and even with those, the variations in how/when/where autographs are signed makes his familiarity worth very little.
Read my blog about Dan Marino autographs for a good example of someone whose autograph basically cannot be authenticated by ANYONE (even himself!):
http://autographsforsaledotcom.wordpres ... enticated/
I like what you have to say.
The autograph seller in question is easily familiar with 1000's of celebrities and sees thousands of autographs every month and was my mentor at one point.
But more importantly we need to do our part to bring fun and education to this hobby. I believe that eBay and, back in the day, Yahoo auctions made it easy for all orders of scum to print photos and peddle their forgeries to a mostly unsuspecting audience. Luckily there has been a shift at eBay (I help daily with removal of bad sellers) and Yahoo is gone. The only real big danger ,in my opinion, is Amazon. Already several well known scumbags have accounts there and are pushing their junk on another mostly innocent audience.
Again we just need to educate as best we can and over time there will be a shift.
The universe pays attention to what we focus on. If we focus on the negative we will get more of it. I find it is best to focus on the positive.