The whole scoop
Basically we can produce bad regular bred seeds just as we can bad feminized seed stock. It is all in the method used and the selection of parent plants.
When we breed for regular seeds with a male and a female, we need to select individuals that carry the traits we want to see passed on down the line in the cross. This includes selecting plants that do not hermie under normal grow conditions. These plants may not show hermie unless they see severe stress of some sort. If both the mother plant chosen and the father plant show no signs of carrying the hermie trait as a dominant gene, then they may be chosen to use for breeding.
The problem with regular m/f seed breeding is that many times the male of the cross will not be tested. It only get chosen because it may have a heavy funk, lots of trics on the stalks, or be more vigorous than it's siblings. However, we really don't know if it is acarrier of the hermie trait or not. We will need to actually pollinate something we know to be a hermie free (or true breeding) mother plant with the pollen of our untested male. Then grow them out, and see if there is hermie present in the cross. If not, then you can feel better about using him in your original cross.
This part is not done my the majority of hobby breeders out there.
They simply choose a male and let the pollen fly.
By using untested stock, we may or may not have created stock that wants to hermie easy.
Now, the exact same scenarios exist when breeding for feminized seeds. We must choose two parent plants that we know aren't heavy hermie plants, and in this case we are looking for two females.
Females, as we know, are much easier to discern their hermie holding traits. All we need to do is grow them out and give them a bit of stress to test their genes.
We don't need to go through the process of crossing them with other known stable strains to test there worth, we can simply flower them out and test from there.
When some folks talk about how much easier it is to pick parents for fem stock than for regular m/f bred stock, this is what they are talking about. With fem seeds we get to bypass the long drawn out testing of the male.
And since our parents are plants that don't want to hermie, or produce stamen and male pollen, we must use a severe stress to bring out the hermie. So we need to use a solution that causes the plant to hermie so we can get her pollen since she doesn't want to give it up naturally. STS is one of those solutions, and it basically presents silver ions to the plants pathways and blocks the reception of ethylene, which is essential to the production of the female flower. If the female is blocked, the male will take over, which is simply a survival function of the plant.
Some plants will not hermie, and they would be considered true females. Probably the most rare of finds. These plants, such as the actual Cheese cut are reported to not be able to reverse even with heavy stress. They simply don't have the intersex gene to be able to hermie. These could only be used in the female side of a F/F cross.
And the genetics involved is exactly the same as it is with the regular bred seeds. If we choose good parents, good progeny is the likely result.
Bad fems seeds would be those that had no testing done of the parents and produced hermie laden seeds. OR...the seeds provided came about from other neighboring plants going hermie and releasing pollen in the grow area.
In regular seed breeding we can choose poorly and come up with bad seeds. Same with feminized seed breeding. There is absolutely no difference in the two when it comes to how the genes work.
The only difference at all is that there will be no male chromosome in the seeds produced. Each and every other aspect of the resulting seeds come from the parents, and the parents were selected by the breeder. So, basically the breeder has control of if the seeds are good fem seeds or bad fem seeds.
There is lots of good info that is written up in proper studies. Start out by googling Mohan Ram. He is the pioneer of modern feminized seed breeding and his information is priceless.
