Kevin,
That last post reminds me of Chris H's 'Angelina's Teacup', a hybrid of sedum Angelina painstakingly bred for four generations just to eliminate the more constant blooms of it's great grandparent. What a hard thing to breed for when you require the very thing you are trying to eliminate to raise the next generation!
Despite acknowledging the desire of a nursery to have semps that bloom less frequently, it certainly is helpful to us as hybridizers to have the option to work with a plant each season. Perhaps the nurseries might forgive a plant that blooms regularly if it's blooms were exceptionally beautiful. There's definitely got to be a higher ratio of offsets to blooms though, no one likes a bloom-out! I notice the wulfenii hybrids tend to bloom more than others, I crossed many of those with my first calcareum bloom ever from 'Pink Pearl' this year. Hopefully I'll get some interesting wulfenii calcareums with more reasonable bloom frequencies.
I'm very interested in seeing your velvet calcareums!
On another note, what do you make of the brownish tint in this bloom...

It comes from mountain crest's 'Comet', an orangish brown plant that fades to green with very small patches of velvet towards the end of the leaves and strong fringe cilia. I think the obvious contributing species is marmoreum but I feel like there is probably something else at work here to.
This is MCG's picture of the plant during it's most radiant color phase:
other less tawny hybrids seem to be very prevalent in the local nurseries here in Portland, versions of 'Commander hay' and 'Ruby Hearts' from Little Prince (possibly incorrect names) bare a strong similarity to this plant though they are more grey/purple than orange/yellow but all have the brown overtone and slightly golden pink flowers.

(That's the version of 'Ruby Heart' I see all over the place) I've been raising seed from this group of similar plants and hope to shed some light on their heredity. This year I made several crosses between these and yellow flowering plants in hopes of making plants with golden yellow blooms.
-Sol