>>6416270I've been looking at this question for a while and it's essentially 3 aesthetical points that old 90s-2000 sets did differently than modern sets. Colors, flat edges, and minimalist faces/prints.
As you said, there was a significantly smaller assortment of colors to choose from. There were less in-between shades so at least to me, the contrast gives the sets a little more vibrancy. Then with the edges, Lego has been loving making smoothed rounded parts which, imho, is much less appealing stylistically then what we had before. Older sets were definitely inferior in terms of raw engineering, but goddamn do I miss shit like the old airport glass panels and the octagonal "domes" from the Aquazone lines. And then lastly, with the prints, I know the 2000s were a hot mess of a bunch of preliminary styles of faces before they got to their current look, but to me, the old solid black eyes without highlights look so much better. Not to mention back in the 80s and 90s, everyone was fucking smiling. There were distinct bad guys and good guys yeah, but Lego gave the sets an extra layer of innocence and fun when literally every minifigure had a big wide smile on their face. Even ghosts and skeletons looked happy. Now every bad guy has to look evil and grumpy and idk, but the lack of extra detail and the ambiguity amongst the faces was better in my eyes. Aquazone is a solid example of all the points I'm discussing and it's a prime example as to where I think Lego went wrong. Even something like UFO with their flat faced saucers I still prefer over something out of any modern alien line with smoothed rounded parts.
