...it's an exceptionally rare case where some filthy-rich fruitcake hoards Trent Reznor/Richard D. James quantities of truly exquisite gear and can't/won't do anything with it. In the majority of cases, people are spending their own money on readily-available equipment. Equipment they sell at a discounted price to YOU if/when they realize they're not making it as Prurient 2.0 or whatever. This is truly a non-issue.
-- jingram
Dunno about that "non-issue" part. Sure, others' mistakes might fuel the used module market. But at the same time, I would be a bit nervous about buying a used module from someone who got it because "it looks cool" and NOT because of what it does, what it can do with other modules in a build, and so on. What if "I never could get the sound I wanted out of it" actually turns out to be "I plugged the ribbon into an unkeyed header backwards and hopefully you won't notice that when you buy it"? Definitely seems like a latent issue to me.
I'm not trying to put a stop to wackjobs like the Swiss Guy With Too Much Damn Money above, though...although, from experience, they're A LOT MORE common than one might think. There's still a lot of synths hiding in stashes in Japan, for example, because you had buyers over there scooping up gear from all over when their economy was still on a roll, and then squirreling it away in climate-controlled vaults and the like back in the 1990s. Much of that hasn't seen the light of day since. If the majority of it still works and isn't dead due to component degradation, I'd be surprised. "Synth-flippers" are another flavor of synth-hoarders, also...they go around scooping up anything that they think they might be able to curbstone, but in the process these types wind up stashing away a lot of gear that might've been usable for a musician...but which they see as "parts hosts", scrapyarding literally tons of devices. Now, yes, there NEEDS to be SOME of that going on...but the scale to which I've seen in several cases (a couple of them quite recent, I note), there's no real love for the instruments there, as they just get dumped all over the place and often never see any use or, sometimes, never even get broken down for parts. But again, you can't "fix" that...it's shitty habitual business practices at work, and I've seen that particular set of practices more times than I'd care to count since Mark Vail's effin' book wrecked the used market in the mid-1990s.
What I am trying to rein in, though, is people jumping into this and then finding out that they'd mistakenly leapt into the "1,000 feet" end of the pool, with a lot of general frustration following shortly afterward. That's not good for music, period. Plus, the systems bought in that way tend to NOT go up on the market, because the original purchaser is...well, sort of embarrassed, as a rule. So that doesn't supply much of a backflow into the used market, either.