>>10050254For most of the Bay movies, there was still merit to the complaint as many of them literally did look like they were made of scrap metal glued to a robotic frame. Autobots faired better most of the time and looked like somebody artfully hacked up a car and glued the bits on a robot frame but many of the Cons got really fucked and looked like shredded metal. There are decent ones here and there but overall, things got pretty messy. And while I get what you're saying about how realistically, yes, they would need to be complex in order to move and emote, but there's definitely a line where things stop being visually legible when action heats up. Quite a few scenes from the first movie were hard to tell just who the fuck was doing what to who because it was too many complex moving bits all clashing together on top of some highly unconventional body types, quick cuts, and shaky cam, and it only got worse as the movies went on.
Compare this to the designs in Bumblebee where they definitely found that sweet spot of looking realistic but still being easy to read and track in motion. The tiny mechanical bits are there but they're between gaps in the larger more identifiable components of the alt mode and actually give a firm shape to the bots. They looked like they were actual machines held together with their sensitive components protected whereas many Bay film designs looked like the fuckers should be rusting, shorting out, and falling apart with how many bits and bobs just hung out and about and any pieces you could call armor were thin, small, and spaced the fuck out. The Bay movie designs were chaotic while BB designs took a more restrained and measured approach.
