Reissues (my thesis)  

koen
my best to do you glad to hear you are the mend
You will feel like a new person real soon,

i saw in a magazine tha...
i saw in a magazine that Carl Hansen is issueing a great looking Hangs Wagner chair with Paul Smith fabric as soon as i can get the picture i will post I love that these folks and Vitra are redoing some the Icons with a new look, ok with me,

Sheeesh!
Even after a rehab on the pump and loaded with blood thinner, Koen can condense it to essence better than I.
"There is simply a limit to how many "well known" designers one can memorize."--Koen
To play on T.S. Eliot, "This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a nostalgia."
We owe it to the good young designers to break out of this brand channelling and resume praising and buying the best designed products of our time, whether originals or repros. We are all of us gate keepers.
And I can just hear your last words before going under anaesthetic: "You know, the knob on that anaesthetic drip is quite good, but could benefit from...uh...benefit...ah....zzzzzzzzzzzzzz."
Oh, and by the way, thank god you're doing well!

Function too
I would hesitate to place all the blame on nostalgia. I am grateful for re-issues in that I would buy an original if they were readily available. That they are not neccessitates buying a re-issue. In the instances where I was lucky enough to find a usable/affordable original piece I happily use it.
That being said, I certainly understand the why the big companies rely on the existing brands that they have developed. I do think that is an issue relative to why new designers remain mostly anonymous - but not the final word in re-issues.
I think its interesting that companies have almost hyperbranded the big designers into deities, with such magical presence that everything they ever thought of is suddenly worthy of production. To go back to the Eames as an example (since that is why my knowledge lies) there are reasons why certain pieces were not put into production during their lifetimes. With the elevation of the Eames into a product brand it became only natural to have a full range of products, from cheap to expensive, rather than have a specific product to address a specific function.
The Eames/Saarinen chair is ugly as hell - clearly before Ray Eames brought her artistic eye into the equation. The LaChaise was always too expensive to resonably produce. The Eames Elephant was also too costly in the tooling. All of these things could have been produced, but weren't.