I see tobacco a little different, Nate. Wine is a finished product. A painting is a finished product. But a tobacco blend is just an aggregate of separate tobaccos mixed together in a can. When you read the reviews, one has virginias, burleys and black cavendish with maybe a splash of latakia. Another is burley and cavendish with a bit of virginia for sweetness topped with latakia. They are just different proportions (basically) of the same stuff, other than any added toppings, etc. Oversimplified but you get my drift.
So when mixing blends, you are just altering the proportions in many cases and combining whatever toppings or other processing effects. No different than when the first colonialists discovered perique from the natives and tried adding a pinch to their tobacco. I've never met a tobacco that was so bad I'd throw it away without finding something I could blend it with to make it much better. I guess I'm very frugal. I know what I like and while there are great blends, few are ever exactly what I would choose to make and blending blends offers an almost infinite palette of constantly changing flavor choices, many of which quite possibly no one but you has ever discovered before!
What I'm smoking right now is impossible to duplicate. It is a blend of three frankenblends, each themselves made from previous frankenblends, some of the constituents of which go back ten years aging and are no longer even made today. When it's gone, its gone.
Just as any pipe carver here will tell you, it is great to buy a magnificent pipe! But it is a thrill beyond words when you carve it yourself with your own hands. Nice enough to find a commercial blend that smokes great--- infinitely better joy smoking it when it is something you yourself came up with.
The day might come when all we can get is raw tobacco (maybe grown by ourselves), and there is a bit of the tobacco "prepper" in me trying to learn what goes into making good blends myself. :mrgreen:
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