It may be a new written policy for certain categories, but I haven't been exposed to such a policy. A VM would have scoffed at the idea of allowing their vendor

It may be a new written policy for certain categories, but I haven't been exposed to such a policy. A VM would have scoffed at the idea of allowing their vendor to sell the same product through Seller Central for years now. A vendor could discretely do this by setting up a 3P account and not telling their VM about it, but that's dishonest business and to be completely fair, you cannot honestly expect Amazon to allow that. In the case of CRaP items, it's actually become a new strategy for VMs to allow some hybrid selling to keep assortment on the site while still allowing the company to turn a profit on the sale. My mistake on the pricing of Seller Pro, but the point still stands.