Not a personal thing, but people are too willing to let others do the work. We are all guilty, because even if the will is there, often the time available is not.
The early Standard catalogues started listing increasingly minor varieties because the mentality of collectors is to collect something if it appears on a list, so the expansion of a list is a heaven sent opportunity to expand the collection without having to do any homework, and the benefit to say Seaby's was the potential sale of half a dozen coins to the collector whereas before one would have sufficed, having already ticked 'The Box'. Look at the number of varieties that are documented and then suddenly everyone and their dog has one. Those collectors could have looked at their coins before, noted the differences and investigated - but relatively few people take this course.