Insert Quality--On Every Card!

How did we survive the days before insert cards? If Classic had any say in it, we didn't. For their 1995 issue (which I have a few cards of, around here somewhere), they made each card look like an insert card, causing massive sensory overload. Seriously, has there ever been a phenomenon quite like inserts?

People went nuts for them and yet, supposedly in limited quantity, there seemed to be more inserts than regular cards produced in the mid-Nineties. I stopped caring about finding and coveting inserts after a few months for two reasons: a) they were literally everywhere, and b) most of them were glorified subset cards.

And I think that by 1995, while some collectors may have been chomping at the bit for an entire set that looked like insert cards, a few of us were generally sick of it. And frankly, a whole set that looks like inserts? And because you know that there were inserts in the insert-worship set, what did they look like? Regular, white cardboard cards?