Well what happened back then wasn't much different to what's happened more recently with strains like Gorilla Glue and Wedding Cake, which are also select phenos, and then seed companies see the hype and create their own knock-off seed versions of the cut. You can find fire in some of those seeds and similar phenos, but it's generally not the same of the original cut.
Blue Dream was huge back in the day, I remember when it surpassed Sour D in hightimes top strains, because people were growing so much of it. The thing is the seed companies didn't have access to the original haze genetics that the Santa Cruz grower had. The Santa Cruz Haze in original BD was something the grower had been working on for a bit, and it wasn't just Super Silver Haze, which is what most people will tell you that it is.