Thank you for all that, Keef 1 I'm old, but have life experiences, and knowledge, but not in Marijuana....yet.
Wife and I are really interested in having seeds to sell to local customers, at a decent fair price. Hence the research and understanding of feminizing seeds. I fully understand that cloning is about the only true way to preserve the exact nature/genes of a particular plant. That is how we have Pinot Noir, Chardonnay (which there is a CBD Hemp variety with that name as well) Gewurztraminer and others. These are all simple bud grafts "clones" of some original plant. Even the Red and Yellow Delicious apple can trace their ancestry back to a single tree. An old Quaker in Missouri cut down a chance seedling growing in his orchard that was not in the tree row. He did it 3 times and it still came back, so he said "If ye must live, then let thee live" and moved it into a regular apple tree row. When it produced apples he entered them in a contest held by Judge Stark (of Stark Bros. Nursery) and when it was first eaten Mr. Stark said "this is Delicious" and sought out that owner of the tree and paid him for taking cuttings of bud wood from that original tree. Buds were grafted onto seedling rootstock and whole orchards planted. One orchardist, Roy Bisbee noticed that one of this trees not only grew shorter inter nodes for fruiting (a trait called "spur fruiting" but that it colored up a lot more red early on, hence the first Red Delicious, which Stark Bros. bought as well and turned it into Stark Bros. Spur Red Delicious (Bisbee Cultivar). Washington apple industry is built on the fruit that grew as a single chance seeding in some Quaker's orchard back in Missouri.
Anyway, completely off topic but that is the value of cloning. Pretty much all fruit varieites you see today have originated from crosses, either by nature, or purposedly made by mankind. Grape seeds themselves do NOT reproduce a plant like their mother. Even thought pretty much ALL wine grapes and most juice and jelly grapes are self fertile, they will not produce anyting near uniform that can be relied on if you are looking for consistent fruit, and disease tolerance, as well as cold hardiness. St. Pepins, a variety from Elmer Swenson' s breeding program, is a female only grape, and needs to pollinated by a nearby male or self fertile grape to be able to produce fruit and seeds. The initial fruit is something akin to Riesling in taste and quality, but any seeds produced will not be St. Pepins, but rather something else. There has been some research, myself including, in breeding St. Pepins to Riesling and getting a Riesling type plant that looks, grows, and tastes like Riesling, but carries the earliness genes of the St. Pepins plant. Giving growers a possible "Riesling" type of wine in areas that are too short of a growing season to mature Riesling to an acceptable level.
You mentioned Polyploid plants, and wheat, Triticales ( a wheat x rye cross - first generation sterile) as well as a lot of other common everyday plants are Tetraploid plants or with similar multiple sets of chromosomes. I'll leave the rare and unusual crossings to those with higher sill sets and a lot more education then myself.
The issues I see with creating feminized seeds is the resulting offspring seeds, will probably be close to the original "variety" , such as Bubblelicious Auto, but their is no guarantee that all the traits you are hoping for are going to make it across , which, for the most part is not bad, but sometimes you may accidentally get someting better in the rresuling seed. THAT'S when you need to really need to 'isolate" that particular offspring with cloning. Unfortunately, with Autoflower the fact that it has a DNA that says "live so long and die" is working against you , since any vegetative growth will have already have had that "time clock" instilled in the plants growing makeup. Perhaps tissue culture, which may circumvent that "auto" part of the plant... not sure at this time of writing.
