This is a very, very simple issue: What is best for Vintage or Legacy as a format? There is only one obvious answer. If you care about Vintage or Legacy as a FORMAT, then obviously reprints are a must.
The situation is far more dire in Vintage than Legacy. There are only 23,500 copies of power ever printed.
Consider this: Magic is growing quite rapidly. Zendikar was the greatest selling set ever. There are more people playing Magic at all levels than ever before. Even cards printed 2-3 years ago are very undersupplied to meet demand. See Goyf.
If we want Eternal Formats to grow, and I hope we do, reprints are going to be inevitable. Unless you like having Eternal formats be elitist (which I certainly oppose, except on age discrimination grounds (i'm not a fan of playing against 12 year olds), then reprints are the only solution.
Face the facts: the people who made Magic had no idea it would ever be the popular. It's not only growing beyond Richard Garfield's wildest imagination, but beyond what people expected even 5 years ago.
Legacy faces a critical problem: Dual lands are the fundamental building block of the format. They are actually more important than basic lands. You can't build anything by mono-colored decks without dual lands. Dual land + Fetchland is the most important interaction in that format.
It would be like if basic Forest cost $50. That's what's going on in legacy at the moment. It's a huge problem.
But the problem in Vintage has been much worse; we've just come to accept it as inevitable. To play Vintage in the long-run you need power. Power costs a ridiculous amount, and those prices are only going to get worse. Again, what would it be like if basic Island cost $300. That's the magnitude of the problem.
If you care about Eternal formats, then the Reserved list is a fundamental impediment to their growth and vitality.
I'm sorry you disagree.
I think your comment about the $50 basic lands was right on the money (so to speak). When a card becomes so necessary in a deck that to play without massively affects your chances, it shouldn't be that expensive. We saw with many FTV: Exiled cards that even when they were reprinted, the value of the older cards didn't plummet as many predicted. Collectors enjoy older, hard to find cards, whereas the new members enjoy simply getting into the format. Card value will go down, for sure, but it won't suddenly turn that $300 mox into a $25 rare.
I think I can offer a unique perspective here as someone who is transitioning from T2 to Vintage. When I first began magic, Vintage was a fantasy-land. Paying upwards of $2500 for a few cards? Impossible. And I'm sure the majority of the new players in Zendikar you mention think the same way. It's like being 12 and dreaming of a Ferrari. They're not the ones WotC is catering to with reprints though, so having a host of 12 year old descend on Vintage and asking why they can't cast a bolt mid-resolution because 'it's instant speed' is pretty unlikely. Now I'm at a point where I've got my vintage deck put together save the power cards. On the one hand, collecting them will be a hugely expensive endeavor, but on the other hand, I know that if I needed to, I could sell them down the road without much loss. Same goes for my other cards: I moaned about the price while buying them, but if WotC was to reprint and lower the big-ticket cards, I'd feel slightly cheated. Catch-22.
Sometimes the Vintage atmosphere can seem like that of a prestigious country club. It takes a huge amount of money to get in, if you can even get yourself on the waitlist (by finding a complete set of P9), and once you're there, members are few and far between because of the restrictions. All the while they bemoan the decline of the format while not bothering to lower the price of admission.
The question seems very simple - the health of the format or the greed of it's members.
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