I will never foget my disappointment as a 5 year old kid finally finding a Jawa figure at the local Toys R Us and completing my Star Wars collection (of 12 figures!) only to find it was wearing that cloth robe. I hated that they had changed it, and I never saw a vinyl robed one as a kid. Last year when I got the repro it was like a tiny scar on my psyche had finally been repaired.
In my 20s and 30s I wasn't worried about collecting the actual Kenner figures, I had pretty much had them all as a kid (even Blue Snags, who I believe is still in my parents backyard, buried where my sandbox used to be!) and wasn't looking to recollect them. Then I thought, well I'll get good copies of the Original 12, and okay the first 21...plus the bounty hunters, of course...and now I use them in advertising and sales (and accordingly write off the purchases as business expenses!) so I find myself justifying any figure that works for a Death Star scene, or Cloud City characters, or the Hoth figures...so yeah, I am falling back into collecting the Kenner stuff as I near 50, and trying to do so on a budget with no real concern about whether they are repro or not -- I seem to find lots of originals in good condition (weapons be damned!) for far less than the Stan Solos cost, but the likes of an Imperial Gunner might need to be from him.
As far as all the straight-up Repros, a couple of the first figures he did were the Blue Snag and Yak Face, and the violently anti-repro people were so up in arms about it and being really brutal and nasty to him. So his response was basically "Screw you, I'm going to make a point of it to repro the entire Last 17 just because you are being such idiots." But he has always said his real passion in it was getting to the never-before-made-figures which he seems to be getting back to now.
Even there, look no further than the fact that once he did General Lando from the Last 17, he also made a version of him in movie-accurate colors. And he repurposed Amanaman with Darth Maul-like red and black Sith tattoos to an original character he calls Amaulaman. And as you said, he made Force Ghost Ben and Yoda in the matching style of the Kenner Anakin once that figure came up. So even as he took his revenge detour, he was still using it to make new stuff and not just repros.
He has done lots of astromechs and protocol droids, though the protocol droids have mostly dried up now. And he has a really nice looking Droids cartoon version of R5-D4, if you are into the Droids line.
And at the end of the day Hasbro could be cranking any of this stuff out for $10-$15 a pop and totally eat his lunch but they don't and most of us are resigned to the fact that they never will.
