Just another issue I have with the user-settable etched flag: pricing will need significant work for that to work. Right now the normal foil is the only "special case" there, and adding a second "special case" is going to be a non-trivial amount of work.
I'm still leaning towards having them as separate printings (as they are in real life) somehow. Perhaps a separate edition that has a distinct edition icon is still the cleanest way to go, despite the explosion in editions...
It's clear by now that wizards is not stopping the explosion of special "editions" they produce, quite the contrary. So I do need to find nicer UIs for a "we now have a huge amount of editions" problem anyway, along with updates to the edition icon handling that is now cumbersome and old (cumbersome to add special icons for editions i mean, as evidenced by the "ribbon" everywhere and extras having same icon as main set etc).
So if I have to do it anyway, perhaps adding a separate edition for etched is not that big of a deal....