wow had a power outage last night (thanks to the storms) and looks like i missed quite a bit on here!
ill try and give my opinion on a few points that have been made above based on my visit to ryan. As we all know the current grading of 'shop' bats basically comes down to grain structure and blemishes, eg a G1 bat in a shop needs to have X amount of straight evenly spaced grains and nil or very minor blemishes. My experience with Ryan thus far is Ryan places more importance on the ping and pickup of the bat, and lets face it we are buying these things for performance as apposed to putting it on a shelf, so I think he has the right mindset here.
Example would be the bat I have chosen. I am paying $800 for my bat. Not something i was originally thinking of sharing but at the end of the day its going to make little difference. When I get my bat ill post up pics, its definetley not the prettiest bat but the ping was astounding and the pickup (very important to me) was superb. Closest thing I could compare it to was he DC1080LE which i picked up at a specialist cricket centre in VIC. The pickup was quite similar but the hitman had considerably more ping. The DC was also $300 more than what im paying.
Id also like to touch on the stickers. My experience with Ryan is that he will put on whatever sticker on the bat you choose (within his range of stickers). This is misleading to the average shopper who is trying to 'grade' his inventory. I had full choice of stickers and ended up choosing the assasin sticker as i liked it best. I could have put a godfather sticker on it to make people think its a more expensive bat than what it is but I chose what I liked the most.
Hope this helps clear a few things up