There are three judgments on value in your post:
-What is harder to make (carving complexity) should be more expensive.
-What is older should be more expensive.
-What is rarer should be more expensive.
I find I can barely agree with one: that something that is harder to make should be more valuable, maybe I can agree with that, It's not always true, but maybe it should.
That something that is older should be more expensive I definitely disagree. It depends what the object is attached to not its age. In this case it is a set that is identical to a no longer made set that was used for both tournaments that had the best players of their age (Linares look at the pics in this thread it is amazing) and some great championships (Lyon). The set is attached to the era. It will mean more to some people than a collectible from another era. Who says a set that Fisher played with in championship should be more expensive than one played by Kasparov, Karpov, Anand, etc.? It's not because it happened further in the past that it is somehow better or more interesting in itself.
Now that something that is rare is more expensive. Well it depends where. Take Gold. You can probably mine it from asteroids or in the long run other planets. It is rare but not THAT rare in the universe. Now take human excrement. Yes that. It is probably much rarer in the universe than gold. Probably if you needed to make food somewhere on another planet you'd give all you have to buy human excrement to be able to raise some crops (provided you had an atmosphere of course). So I know which one is actually rarer. But for some reason the other one has the most value ;-)
You will say yes but there is lots of human excrement on earth but very little gold who cares about the universe? I will say yes and there are lots of chavet sets owned by people in France who couldn't care less about selling them, but the chavet sets are rare where the buyers are: in the US and the UK....
Thanks for you thoughts Pierre, although I'm not agree with them .
Anyway, Law of supply and demand rules will set the price in the future.
You are right Ron, the new one is horrible!