I see what you're saying. This is kind of an artifact of where our data on a for-sale figure is stored. The "toy type" (sealed,packaged complete, loose complete, figure only) is stored as a sort of primary key in our database, but the description is just stored as a text blob. We have chosen not to have a separate PK for "incomplete" for a few reasons.
1) "Incomplete" could still generate a bimodal price graph. I'm guessing you're a Joe guy, so I'll make a Joe example. A Mauler MBT missing Heavy-Metal's microphone is incomplete, and worth, let's say, $200. That same Mauler with the mic but missing a mudflap is incomplete but worth $500, cus you could probably pick up the mudflap for $5.
2) Even if we separate out all the incompletes, complete prices can still look somewhat bimodal. This doesn't happen nearly as often with GI Joe, but G1 Transformers vary by up to a factor of 2 in some cases: We recently sold a c8 Devastator complete for $145. Two weeks prior, we sold a near mint one with unused papers for $250.
In the end, I think the bigger source of inaccuracies are rapid price growth of 1980s toys in the last two years
(check out this graph!), and low sample size (Darklon's Evader). I don't see an Evader in our sales history missing his rifle, so the one you see on ebay might be someone else's. Our price charts only show items
we have sold on the website or our ebay store.
Either way, thank you for your astute observation. We do try to course correct based on user input like yours, but in this case, we had previously considered which way to handle this and decided to deal with the flaws of lumping "complete minus one part" into the same pricing average. Now you know a little more about the machinery of the site, and hopefully that will make our price charts more useful to you
Lastly, I am far less experience with GI Joe than with Transformers and robots, so if you ever see an item I've listed as "complete" is missing something, feel free to yell at me
