Well to be fair to the good seed vendors there are a bunch of good seed vendors but I suspect unfortunately there are many that have popped up more recently since the world stop demonizing cannabis as much as it used to and many of those seed vendors/breeders might be sacrificing quality and reputation just to cash in on the expanding market? Good quality breeders spend years stabilizing and perfecting a new strain, there is a ton of work that goes into it that you seldom see anywhere in forums other then forums dedicated to breeding. Which I suspect most growers don't check out because they can get pretty deep into things the average grower just doesn't understand. I can't name anyone specifically but I'm willing to bet there are people who take pollen from one strain and sprinkle it on the buds of another strain and called the seeds produced a finished product. When in reality that's just the earliest beginning of a quality strain. I'm sure there are literally books out there written on everything that true breeders do to produce a good strain. So basically I would say just put some time into researching the breeder as well as the strain before you buy. Every seed can be a winner if produced by a quality breeder but if you end up buying from an unknown breeder because they have cheap prices you're taking a chance. Really when you find someone who has much lower prices that's a warning flag right there. Good genetics can be a bit pricey but it's really pretty reasonable when you consider the full potential that can be achieved from each seed as well as the years of work that goes into stabilizing a good new strain. I haven't checked the prices lately but back when I last looked I think the highest price I saw was $100 for a pack of 10 seeds. More average prices but still good quality was more like $40-$60 for a pack of 10 and then there were bargains out there below $40 for 10 but those would be the ones to question. Anyway lets take the $100 seeds, now if you took one seed and grew one plant to it's fullest potential you should get several ounces of dried cured bud, how many ounces would depend on the strain and how good the environment it was grown in. What's the going price on the market for an ounce of good cannabis though between $300 - $600 per ounce maybe more depending on the market you're in. You can see right there that one seed is going to pay for the whole pack many times over if everything is done right.. So yeah if you buy a pack of 20 seeds from a poor quality breeder maybe you get one Jordon out of 20 or maybe even no Jordons at all. If however you buy from a quality well establish breeder then maybe they're almost all Jordons or at least an NBA Dream team.
Now back to the trichome thing, if they are all or 80 to 90% clear then that's going to effect your opinion of the quality of the bud because it's roughly the same thing as eating a banana that's still mostly green. That banana isn't going to taste very good or sweet at all but it doesn't mean the banana is bad, that same banana when properly ripened to all yellow with a few brown spots might be the best damn banana you ever had. So you really do have to get it to where the trichomes are at least 90% cloudy before you can fairly judge how good the bud is. That being said though even when it's mostly clear you should still get a decent buzz off of a bud. It won't be anywhere near what it should be but you should still be able to get some good experience from it. I know I've smoked bud that was still mostly clear that I cut off early because they were lower, small popcorn bud that was never going to amount to much. By trimming them off it allowed the plant to focus it's energies on bigger buds that had the potential to get much bigger. While that smaller mostly clear bud didn't get me anywhere near what the finished buds would it was still fairly enjoyable.
