>>11546438I'm a big fan of the 80's and 90's style of building. With the available range of pieces they had they more or less perfected a more abstract style that was easy to build for kids, fun to play with but still specific enough to resemble real-life or make-believe subjects. What you call just plain boring and blocky i think is a good style on its own. Ofcourse this is highly subjective. But seeing what parts they had to work with, the more minimal aproach was a good decision in my opinion.
The fact that "even bad guys had smiley faces" is another product of this that i actually really like. Instead of already existing binary badguy/goodguy relationships, like a lot of current themes, this challenged kids to come up with their own or expand upon the stories and rules.
The last thing that can be hard for adult fans to realize is the "easy to build for kids" argument. While Lego is getting better now at giving the consumers different difficultylevels of builds with the juniors line for example, i've had parents tell me that the newer sets are so complicated compared to the older style that the sets get built once and then they don't really feel like dismantling them anymore. They have more trouble getting their heads around the more advanced techniques used in sets, so when they build their own mocs they fall short compared to the original models by such a large degree they just keep them stock. Adult fans now often had a more natural learning curve along with the complexity of sets over the years. Starting off with simple sets. Maybe getting into some model-team early on. Then the later 2000s/2010's stuff and eventually graduating with modulars and ucs style
