Andrew - I always get the Antony and Octavian 528 and 517 confused when skimming through sales, but I've never bought a 528 because you are right, they're really poorly made. The variation in the portraits is tremendous and yes, the lettering, is almost comical. Your examples are as good as they seem to get!
The Caesar lifetime portrait issues, in general, are just downright frustrating. They are so populous, so expensive, and so difficult to find really well made on both sides prompted my primate comments (actually, I think they were probably wine swilling Gaulish captives).
This is an interesting topic, though. I've been madly expanding my library - (still hoping to find a Hamburger 1925 in my mail someday 
) Reviewing through the wonderful old sales in the early to mid 20th century, the quality of the some issues that seem more readily available then appears different from today. Granted, only the highlights of the sale were usually illustrated, but those are often the coins I'm chasing today and in much poorer state than seemed available back then. Nice Caesar portrait denarii, for instance, seem to be plentiful. Maybe it's because I've got a century worth of auctions that I'm looking at...I don't know. I need to see if I can locate some nice examples of Crawford 517 in the old catalogues.
Do you think that very high quality scarcer issues were, in general, easier to come by at auction a century ago or is it my imagination?
I suspect that a
Hamburger 1925 will indeed fall through your letterbox at some point.
Yesterday I stumbled on another great old proveance coin , my Antony
Pietas denarius turns out to be from the Vidal Quadras y Ramon
collection sold by Etienne Bourgey in November 1913. I don't think any deliberate process is necessary, sometimes I come across a coin of mine in a book and I just add
a post it tab to the page edge with my
collection number. I found another yesterday too, my Antony/Sol 496
denarius is a plate coin in
Sear Imperators. And a
Sulla 359 that I bought unprovenanced at the Coinex bourse turned out to be the RBW coin. Someone made a loss between NAC63 and Coinex. I discovered that only when browsing my new RBW book, which is really perverse as I
sat beside Wilfred Danner as he laid out every page and of course reviewed NAC63 a dozen times for errors but missed my own coin. Comparing many-on-many databases is not an easy task. I think the only feasible way of doing it is to go through each catalogue/reference in turn, and then consider each coin in turn and see whether it matches. It sounds like a job for late evenings over cocoa or whisky.
Speaking of whisky,
Crawford 528, 528/2 with or without
star is badly made as compared with the beautiful inevitably-well-struck examples of
Crawford 517, but 528/3 is in another lower league (the Vauxhall Conference perhaps, supporters will understand). I've seen one or two adequate examples with just some flatness but never a nice one. I haven't checked
Haeberlin or other landmark sales. But it wouldn't surprise me if they are all terrible rather like the Cnaeus Pompey 477 issues. That's why I decided to buy the one at top, it is pretty close to
mint state but perhaps GVF/aVF in normal grading but I suspect its as
good as I'll ever get sub $1k for 528/3. Today, given my heightened awareness of the problems with 528, I bought the
Rauch 528/2 with
star, a quite well made albeit ornery VF coin. In retrospect I really wish I'd bagged the RBW example of 528/2. RBW never
had a 528/3, which I suspect is very
rare. The
Crawford plate example of 528/3, flat on
Octavian head, might be the best. That
Crawford lists multiple spelling varieties on 528/3 is a sure sign that the monkeys were at
work, the bronzes of C.Vibius Pansa perhaps being comparable in their shocking manufacture and absurd spelling varieties. Checking the
Crawford plate coin which is stylistically like 528/2 and with only the typical moderate flatness of 528/2 I suspect there were two distinct issues, and the top two coins in this
thread were issued by an incompetent
field mint somewhere. I know of no nice examples of that
style. It would make an interesting study paper. I'll add it to my reserve list when next asked for something!
