>>5453040It actually makes a little sense; most of the characters were from the first wave of the line, which is when things were still rusty. The first 3 Deluxe waves except Wolfang all had show models, Wolfang unfortunately losing out a role on the show due to it being easier to tweek cheetor's model. None of the 97 Deluxes were adapted.
With the Megas, Scorponok probably got chosen because they already had an arctic Maximal planned(which became Tigatron). Inferno was the first of the '97 Megas and likely got first dibs.
With the basics, you're right, they did have a few options. I'm gonna guess Rattrap was chosen over Razorbeast as to not have too many African mammals. Terrorsaur is a flying "dino" so that probably won the popularity contest over Iguanus. Then with the '97 stuff, we know Airrazor got adapted due to the figure looking gender neutral enough to pass for female.
With the Fuzors, Silverbolt likely won over Torca due to the ease of adding a flying character to stories. With Quickstrike, it was probably to use whatever animation rig was used for Scorponok's beast mode. And then with the transmetals, they were all based on existing show characters except Rampage and Depth Charge, who were added in.
So all things considered, there seems to be some reasoning for why certain toys got picked(being from the first wave of a given year), though some of it is my own speculation.
