If I'm not mistaken Rod only breeds Onyx perculas which have regular perc striping but the orange pretty much gets replaced with black. Mine arrives tomorrow by 10:30 am to hopefully befriend my Picasso, I can't wait!
As far as the darkening of the ORA picassos the orange on mine is actually starting to turn black, but some of these fish stay orange. As far as price is concerned, I don't know how long it will be till the price goes down since there seems to be mile long wait lists for them from vendors. When I first started looking into them awhile ago they were supposed to be $50 or so according to ORA themselves. I guess vendors decided to jack prices up kinda like ebay toys that everyone has to have for the holiday season. I wonder if ORA is like DeBeers when it comes to these fish, horde the picassos to jack up the prices.
The newest "it" clown seems like it's going to be the ever so ugly cotton candy clown, I think that's the name of it, pretty much all white.