>>11441401I personally was/am the same too, but you have to remember that the people making the decisions 30, 40+years ago, were born before the concept of collecting toys for the characters was really established. Think of what a "toy" would've been to a person before action figures were a thing- something vaguely in the shape of something, that would have a gimmick. A tin soldier that walks. A monkey that claps cymbals. That sort of thing didn't entirely go away overnight, the idea that it has to do something.
All the later designers would've been coming up after having grown up collecting and being interested in toys for the character itself over what the gimmick was. Guys like Shogo Hasui were into the Transformers cartoon, so the characters were important to him, not just what missiles the toy had.
