Yeah, no offense but that argument is bull****. For starters, I'm still looking for Bespin Leia and haven't seen her in a long time, but I still see Jar Jar and sprinkles of others around. You can't assume that availability in your area matches everywhere else. I'm sure she's plentiful in some areas and hard to find in others. Second, I don't know of anyone who buys more of something or picks it up solely because its rare. The fact that the figure is short-packed doesn't make me want it any more or less, and I wouldn't buy more than one of these unless I thought a friend needed it. With your logic, producing 1,000 of a female figure means they sell all 1,000, but producing 2,000 of them means they'll only sell 500. If you buy into that, I have some land on the moon I'd like to sell you. Oh, and if that were true, they should have short-packed Grim Reaper because he'll peg warm worse than three repacked Iron Men.
The fact is that Hasbro either has no clue what figures people actually want or they're letting the bottom line decide what characters to put into an assortment. Do they do any research at all? As someone who works in the industry, I find it appalling that they have reams of free feedback from consumers on sites like this, but they continue to just ignore it and release these ridiculous ratios. I'm sure it's appealing to put repack Iron Man who costs $.75 per figure in the case in place of all-new Wasp who costs $1.50 because it eats into their profits. But it's that kind of short-sighted thinking that undermines the success of the line in the long run. When I see heavy collectors of stuff like this bail on the line, it's typically because they're frustrated with the complexity or cost of trying to track down crap that's hard to find, like short-packed figures and exclusives. And when Walmart or Target bail on the line because they have 20 Iron Men warming the pegs, who's fault is that?
Sorry, but Wasp is the most popular character in that wave - producing just one of her is just plain stupid.