I think covers are the LEAST important aspect of comic books! This trend to equate a comic book with its cover dates back to the Gerber Photo Journals and has been reinforced by both GCD and CGC.
I'm not a cover (or art, frankly, except as it helps tell the story) person, myself, but it's an understandable issue. After all, the publishers, cataloguers, and shops all focus heavily on the covers. It's sort of an unspoken rule of society that we pretend it's not for purely sales-related reasons, so they must be important to
us, too. Plus, more than a few consumers have dreams of being on the other side of the transaction. So, it might be a "cargo cult" thing, for a lot of people.
But yeah, once you have them all collected in one place, some random subset is only interesting to the extent that acquiring a collection might have stories behind it. Like a good cookbook is more than a recipe collection, it's kind of sad that so few "cover galleries" talk about the personal significance of a cover (why was it selected?) or tell the story of how some of the issues were acquired.
(I've actually always been surprised that the companies haven't capitalized more on the cover obsession and started selling covers by themselves, pre-mounted on a board for display. A company like DC or Marvel could probably make a fortune with a Print-on-Demand service on one hand and annual "themed" my-favorite-xyz-covers collections on the other.)
((And I also got that you weren't enamored with the covers themselves, Yoc.))
