>>5392317Competition, markets, and retailers.
Transformers in the US has no direct competition, and serves as both a collector's toy and a kid's toy. They have to keep prices down to make a profit on the figures being sold to retailers at retailer-set prices.
The concept of size classes being single price points was a retailer thing. Retailers didn't like that companies could price individual units at different prices due to complexity. In Japan, you can sell each toy at an individual price. The west wanted all figures to be in easy to process size classes and price ranges to make it easier to shelf and process. They don't see figures as "Transformers Generations Optimus," they see it as "Toy, Boy's, $15."
Since they're both kid's toys and collector's toys, they have to follow all the west's safety guidelines, which can increase costs or force things to change. For instance, some people think we couldn't get Groove because of his windshield having too much clear plastic (although I'm pretty sure Chromia is comparable,) or that Scrapper didn't have elbows because of US safety standards for big toys.
This also means that they have to do things like sell Combiners with mismatched limbs, like how Superion had to have a car and helicoptor in his ranks because parents wouldn't buy their kids 5 jets.
In Japan, Transformers seem to be in a weird place where Generations isn't a Kid's toy at all, and things like RiD or Prime are totally meant for kids, and there's a lot more competition in both markets. That's why the Arms Micron figures in Japan had the Arms Microns: kids in Japan like Gundam models, so they wanted to appeal to that.
Basically, a lot of compromises get made in the West because Transformers is not a very focused line.
On the bright side, Hasbro has been talking about doing things like starting an initiative with Diamond for distributing to comic stores, and they teased something about an on-demand figure ordering system a while back.
