Generic seeds

It's all in the marketing and not necessarily just applied to seeds. The producing/marketing bods spend their days thinking of ways to tweak a basic product to market it as 'new' to the unsuspecting public. Think of all the choice we have in the supermarkets and the tech shops. We're convinced by the makers that last years product A is passè and to be truly fashionable we have to have product A mk2. Seeds are no different. Although having said that, many seeds that are our favourites today weren't available say 10 years ago, especially tomatoes in my case.