A little relic of Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan is, shall we say, not widely collected. I happen to like the combination of obscurity and cheapness that countries like this offer, so I have a mild interest in Turkmenistan stamps and postal history. I appear to be in a very small minority.
A few months ago I tripped over a little "find": a large-ish lot of progressive proofs for the first Turkmenistan stamps, issued in August 1992 (disregarding two hastily-retooled USSR stamp issues from earlier that year). It's a lot of stuff! For each of the 7 stamps (counting the two mirror versions of the president Nyazov stamp) and the souvenir sheet in the set there are from 13 to 21 of these proofs. These stamps were printed using 4 colors (red, yellow, black and blue; sometimes gold was used as well) and for each value the lot contains proofs of the individual color plates, as well as 2, 3 and 4-color combination proofs. All are unperforated.

Proof of the black plate for the 15,0 stamp

For the miniature sheet, 20 of these proofs are present, such as:

Proof of the red and black plates

How did all this fun stuff end up on the market? Here I have to speculate a little, but I think here is what happened. These stamps were printed by Specialty Printers of America in Scranton, Pennsylvania. That company was bought by the Mack Printing Group, which eventually became Cadmus Communication Corporation. My theory is that in the changes of ownership some archival material went missing. I've seen occasional other eyebrow-raising items from this issue, such as a complete unperforated printing sheet of one value, but this lot of proofs is the biggest I've seen.

Is it philatelically relevant? Only if you're very interested in the printing process. personally, I find the progressive proofs interesting, and I'm toying with the idea of having the proofs for the souvenir sheet framed. Besides, it was cheap (and obscure!).