The thing this post misses is that the early “landrace” strains needed to be grown by the 1000s to find those exceptional plants to breed with. Once those were found and bred and crossed, only then was it as simple as it is now to find what is now called an elite cut.
The problem with this though is that all these modern elites are from highly bottlenecked genetics.
Once the seed banks popped up in the 80s, most real breeding stopped and it just became a game of crossing strain A with strain B and calling it something new.