>>11007196I don't think it's that as much as Hasbro just doesn't consider him necessary. He was brought on in a freelance way for MP-01 and UT/Classics era to do conceptual design, but then Animated, the Movies, and Prime happened and they all had their own distinct visual style and were designed by the artists working on those projects that the Hasbro designers had to develop into toys, rather than the other way around. The art direction Hasbro headed to were things Don didn't really do(digitally painted ), Don can do some cool styrene designs but Hasbro doesn't really need that, their engineering is done by Takara and Hasbro's technical side requires more precise knowledge about design and budget, and at that point CAD, that Don probably doesn't have.
Plus given turnover rates, the contacts he had with Hasbro(Aaron was the one who had him do some design work) were gone by the 2010s.
I do feel sympathy, in the early 2000's Don was probably one of the top 5 TF artists in the world and him doing Macromasters and designing his own toys and then doing Dreamwave were all legitimately impressive for the fandom at the time. Unfortunately he just fell out of favor and never really found a way to parlay his design work into anything but doing art. If he went the Alex Kubalsky route of doing 3P work he probably would've gotten closer to what he wanted.
