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My Silverbolt finally got here - he's the Takara version (no real difference from the Hasbro version these days, it seems). Now that I have him in-hand, I can saw a few things about him:
One, all the love clearly went into his robot mode. He's a great representation of his show model, even if the feet could have used a bit of work (I hate the loss of the ability to make him grip things with those talons in either mode) and the wings have those hollow sections.
Two: I am baffled by the current trend of having beast mode feet peg into place on these guys lately - both his front AND back legs are supposed to be tabbed in for beast mode, and it annoys me; also, the little pegs on his robot shoulders/beast mode hind legs are useless - they're supposed to lock his robot arms in place, but they aren't really needed and I accidentally snapped one clean off as soon as he came out of the box (to no ill effect. It's not even noticeable). Someone just really seems to have a fetish for tabs or something.
Three: I can now see that the issue with his backside isn't actually the length of his tail - it's the length of his torso. Leaving his shoulder segments untransformed like in pic related actually gives him normal looking proportions and a normal-length tail. However...