Gabe at Anchorage (who brewed M and lots of the other old-school Midnight Sun whales) has certainly pumped out a few beers that hit that sort of hype/demand level, most notably b1 and b3 of A Deal With the Devil.
I've been lucky (read: dumb enough with money) to try M a couple times, and nothing Anchorage has released has even come close to it. Never got the love the DWtD, it was nothing special. I'm not totally sure on the timeline of Todd leaving Floosmoor for 50-50, but the first PvW Eclipse was a legit whale for a while, not on the level of Wooden Hell but it made the lists. I think the main reason 50-50 didn't make more of those beers is that they cashed in by starting to make a ton of everything and then people got jaded. (Though I say this as an unabashed 50-50 homer, I think Eclipse ages better than any other stout I've found.)
Has the KtG brewer's new venture started up yet? It's been years and I've heard nothing. I really liked KtG and wanted it to be easy to get.
To be completely honest, im surprised that 2 roads limited releases are not on the same level as the old southampton ones. Maybe that will change in time? 2 roads igor's dream is pretty damn similar to southampton RIS - bone dry, roasty and hoppy big stout. Phil even put the #newmoneyhypetwist on it and released 3 different barrel aged versions with bottle counts sub 500. I really wanted to try the framboise noir or whatever it was but damn if i have not heard a single peep about that beer post-release.
Another factor is that so much is going on in the beer world now that its easy for a place to make awesome stuff that flys under the radar. Its almost like in order for a place to get the super sought after designation, it takes a certain amount of effort by the locals to drive demand by making trades that garner attention. And when locals dont give a **** about trading, they keep silent about it so they can silently reap the benefits without **** getting crazy. Dare I mention Bullfrog grrrz and how a certain someone offered the likes of midnight sun M for more bottles? People went absolutely bananas, flew in from out of state and ransacked the next release and when it didnt trade for the same level of stuff as the first batch - it seemingly got crucified.
Beer is strange. Demand/highly acclaimed status and how/why it got there is next level perplexing.
Right, it's why you'll have people going absolutely apeshit for something like Assassin when it's worse than the BCBS they have turding up their closet cellars. Or the new craze for all these IPAs. Are they good? Sure. Are they significantly better than the ones that plenty of other local breweries are making? Maybe I'm spoiled, but there are at least 5-6 breweries I can drive to that make beers on par with them. But does anyone outside of driving distance go apeshit when Fieldwork puts on their Galaxy IPA? No, and I don't know what the difference between them and Trillium is.
The trading market is definitely mostly psychological, and while it always has been there used to be a much bigger connection between the objective assessments (bottlecount, cost, #/person, etc) and value, and even the biggest whales had some connection to reality, Dave and M and Framboos were just really ****ing hard to find. But now you have crazy-ass **** where some non-barrel-aged coffee stout can sell for the same price as a Don Q and it makes no sense to me. I wonder if part of it is that 5-6 years ago there was almost no place in the country where you could get all of your basic beer needs met (ie good IPA, stout, Belgian styles, Farmhouse styles, etc), so traders were doing a lot more exploring and it was less about status, but now most major markets will mostly take care of that, so trading has become this stupid dick-measuring contest. It always had that, of course, but now people just getting started aren't looking to sample other place's locals, they go straight for the "whales" (which are now >10,000 unit canned IPA releases or some shitty adjunct stout). Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man. This did get pretty rambling so probably.
