Welcome, Lockwood, to the Heinlein forum!
With regard to the Virginia Edition, I'm overjoyed to have all the novels, shorter fiction and non-fiction all in a single, definitive edition. And the books look great in the glass-doored bookcase I bought for them. Finally, it is a pleasure for an old bibliophile like me to read all of Heinlein's fiction in such well designed and stoutly-printed books.
But an important reason I shelled out for the Virginia Edition was the correspondence and the screenplays, all of which were essentially unavailable elsewhere. If those latter hadn't been included, I doubt I would have ponied up for it The blow to the exchequer didn't quite doom my wife and me to a Ramen-noodle diet, but we didn't go out for dinner for a few months, either.
The correspondence and screenplays are a powerful selling feature for the Virginia Edition, for collectors, scholars and libraries. Until the hardbound Virginia Edition is sold out, I suspect there won't be a paperback version, nor will they publish the correspondence and screenplays separately.
So don't hold your breath waiting. And, when you get down to it, Ramen-noodle dinners aren't all that bad, if you chop up some cold cuts and squirt on some Sribacha sauce!
