A few other things, now I've had a chance to read through the last several pages more thoroughly, and have more time to put together a reply...
I thought Anovos supplied the flight suits and (raw) helmets for Rogue One
Nope. What wasn't done internal in the LFL wardrobe department was done by Far Away Creations aka MonCal. Granted, Cal was also supplying a lot of the "catalogue model" stuff ANOVOS was putting up on their pre-orders, as well as doing actual prototyping for them, before they cut ties (with Cal and others) and transferred everything to China. So it's an easy association to make.
I don't know what the split was. I think the soft goods were Wardrobe (Cal's spent enough time researching the OT flight suits and snowspeeder jackets and such, he wouldn't have made the mistakes the Rogue One costumes exhibit), but I've seen a few pictures of him and his crew working on getting helmets and armor made and finished and out the door, so I know some percentage of hard goods (at least OT style Rebel pilots, not sure about U-Wing pilots, Rebel ground forces... -- I need to ask him). And I tend to trust his research.
Which leads me into first sources. I'm citing quite a few people who have dug into this over the years, but my takeaway is that no ANH helmets are in the LFL Archives. There were two Luke Hero helmets in ANH (preflight and in-flight) and neither reappear after the first film. It's possible they did a ground-up repaint of one of those for ESB, but the details of that helmet don't match either of the ANHes. Similarly, the ESB/ROTJ helmet is not the "Luke" helmet that tours with the exhibitions and such. The rest of the ANH Hero helmets were re-used through ROTJ (including the blast shield helmet), and then the world lost track of them. They're probably in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant, being looked after by Top Men™. Away from movie screengrabs, these are the only ANH-vintage X-Wing helmets I know of out in the wild (thanks Jez):
I don't think the mohawk is as pronounced or as variable as folks think. I haven't done the overlay yet, but I've got all the images of Gold Leader, Gold 3, Gold 5, Red Leader, Red 2, Red 3, Red 4, Red 5, Red 6, Red 10, and the re-used blast shield helmet from ROTJ all lined up and flitting through them shows a pretty consistent mohawk. The lower front corners are aligned almost exactly over the centers of the wearers' eyes, which means the base of the mohawk is a pretty uniform 2½" wide, with the top being around or just under 2". Height looks pretty consistent all the way through to Rogue One, too:
I don't have one yet, but I tried one on at a local ThinkGeek store and it feels about the same size as my APH, as well as looking right on my head compared to shots like the above.
Given they've re-decoed the Black Series Stormtrooper several different ways, I have high hopes this one will see some probably-retailer-exclusive re-decos, too. Which brings me round to Triple Force Friday.
*sigh*
Firstly, there's a generational existential thing. Folks who have grown up with the internet and smart devices are much more "online" than past generations. Physical and virtual are a lot more blurred, and a nonzero number would rather play a game where you can run around as a character and kill baddies with them than make-believe to lesser effect with physical action figures.
Secondly is a largely stagnant economy down here in the streets. Fewer people have the disposable income to get all the things they want. A lot don't even have enough to get
any of the things they want. Additionally, apartment living or moving back in with one's parents means not a lot of room for clutter. So even people who want the product can't easily get or justify it. $12 for the new Autobot card back in '85 was a lot more manageable than $40 now.
Mix that together with a lot of retailers not being able to adapt to the economy shifting ever more online, with places like Toys B We and Sears going from industry juggernauts to practically nonexistant, and we end up with problems. My local Target and WalMart have toy sections overseen by people who aren't dialed-in. This WalMart's toy manager only recently registered that multiple waves of Star Wars action figures come out over time, and that their previous practice of "order a bunch (of what turned out to be wave 1) and wait until it sells through to order more" was angering a lot of potential buyers. I've missed entire waves from TFA on while unsold remnants of wave 1 sat rusting on the pegs. They had no clue. Even stores where the toy people know what's out there and being released are still constrained by what their managers or corporate will let them do.
So there aren't really places any more to browse everything that's currently available. At least, not in person. You can find most of it online -- if you know to look. One of the reasons I so miss Tower Records was the happy accident of running across something you had no idea existed when you went in there for something else entirely. "You may also like" and "customers also bought" algorithms only go so far.
