>>9143469>The stuff we got in 2010 to 2017 was a breath of fresh air in terms of overall designsI’d argue that 1997 to 2012 was a better era. Beast Wars, the original beasts all the way through to Transmetals 2 being unique and fun toys are amazing. Car Robots/RID was a throwaway series that still managed to have great toys, nothing today matches the level of originality and engineering of Gigatron and Fire Convoy. Armada has it’s fair amount of treasures like Megatron, bendy Prime, and Unicron. Energon had almost all their Decepticons be great toys. And Cybertron is almost all good toys. The movies started strong, and Hunt for the Decepticons, despite being non movie toys, were great. Animated was a successful change of pace (it was really only stopped because of Cartoon Network and focusing on the movies). Classics was a sideline so good that it overtook the mainline.
Prime was the start of the end. While it started off good, the problems with trying to keep everything under the Aligned idea, along with the behind the scenes war with the Prime cartoon and Hub crashing and burning, I think really made Hasbro shy with putting effort into new stuff and focused more on the safe G1 rehash. There was barely any effort put into the AoE, TLK, and Bumblebee movies. And the cartoons, which should be the vehicle for new, interesting, and fun stuff, are just cheap throwaway trash. At least Car Robots/RID still got quality toys for that cheap throwaway cartoon.
There is still some effort being put into Transformers, but it is becoming harder to sift through all the other crap it has going on right now.
