>>8042983First of all, Cybertronians aren't as advanced a civilization as you might think. The planet, being the dormant body of Primus, controls and develops a lot of its technology in the same manner that his dream-like state is responsible for the genesis and evolution of the Transformers themselves. You know how in Star Wars technology all kind of seems to be fool-proof, or at least you've got uneducated desert dwellers like Anakin, Luke, and Rey being able to fix and build complicated stuff? It's because the technology is so advanced and standardized that it mostly runs itself. Most of Cybertronian science is robots like Jetfire or Shockwave trying to figure out how it all works through reverse engineering and occasionally applying it to create new technology or copy existing stuff.
If they were as advanced as is usually implied then they wouldn't have an energy crisis, they wouldn't be in civil war over ideology, and they wouldn't view their reproduction as some kind of mystical, ineffable process and could just code their own sparks.
But there's the problem: Cybertronians and their civilization are the dream of a sleeping god whose body turns the dream into material objects. In his nightmares he remembers his brother, Unicron, and the trauma of their war at the beginning of time manifests as greed and cruelty and tyranny: the Decepticons. Cybertronians are a cargo cult on a grand scale, playing out a cosmic struggle that they neither truly comprehend nor remember except through legend.
