The implication was that red delicious are kind of garbage and definitely pedestrian and it’s the same company that introduced both to the world. So I’m lumping them into the same boat on general principle. As an adult I won’t touch red delicious but I will once in a while eat a golden.

But the thing is that apples the size for eating are all tetraploid mutants, but meiosis does not guarantee that the pollinated flower receives 2 full sets of genes from both parents. So you get a lot of giant grab apples which are okay for cider or a pectin source for making jam but that’s about it. Most of the modern crosses are coming from one or two ag universities running giant breeding programs.

They say that you need about a thousand (or was it 10,000?) saplings to yield one interesting specimen. Mark Shepard has a sort of yolo mentality here does wild crosse and grows what he can, which is only in the hundreds, and culls any trees that struggle, because he doesn’t want to throw good time after bad. And sells his surplus for root stock. His thought is that if enough farmers do it then one of them will win the lottery. He likes to diversify and hedge his bets.