Ok...I have been buying Transformers since I had my first 10 dollar bill burn it's way through my pocket as a kid. I was crushed when they disappeared after Gen1 and went nuts when Gen2 came back.Went through the lackluster Machine Wars and the awesome Beast Wars (which blew my mind when my mom said "come look! a new transformers" and the first thing I see is a talking gorilla), and moved through the eventual RID and Unicron Trilogy Phases. When the 2007 movie came out, I bought EVERY SINGLE FIGURE. Repaints in all. Dunno what happened, I just went insane over them. Classics/Generations/Universe I loved. ROTF made me dial it back some with the extensive repaints. Then...Reveal the Shield hit. And my frustration truly kicked off. I was able to get exactly TWO of all the figures in the ENTIRE line in stores. And over the course of the year, I traveled extensively. I would stop and do a quick hunt in a new state, and get NOTHING. So everything had to be ordered online, but even that was picked over and bare, so I had to import...not cheap. Masterpiece Rodimus didn't even hit a single store within a hundred miles of me, and there are 3 Toys R us stores in that range. DOTM let me down with it's designs, but I had hopes for Soundwave in particular. Then the First Edition crap happened, and now the remaining DOTM toys are cancelled. I understand that it's not entirely up to hasbro which stores will have their product, as they must order it in and if they have too much backstock they likely won't. But let's take things like HTS never having items in stock (it's their own website for crying out loud), the constant yet baffling (at least to me) desire to give exclusive Transformers to the single most overpriced toy outlet I have set foot in (cough cough toys r us cough), and the shrinking size+lack of complexity to rising cost ratio, and you have to wonder...what the hell are they thinking? I keep giving them chances when I see a new Classic-verse character mold or things like Fall for Cybertron toys...but then I realize...there is no way in hell I am ever gonna see these toys on a shelf ANYWHERE! I have a hard enough time justifying paying anything over 10 bucks for a deluxe as it is...but then I have to pay a few dollars more than retail plus shipping (assuming I don't wait for a takara version). To make it even less cost effective, the scalpers are all over Hasbro's fumble, so if I don't have the cash the minute a figure becomes available or pre-order it, I'm out of luck. So...the final point of this ridiculously long rant is this: I'm giving Hasbro one last chance. If I don't see more than one of the FOC figures in any store (ten Vortex on one rack doesn't count), or if any of them are cancelled after a long wait, I am DONE with Hasbro. I will stick to the rare affordable Gen1 deal on ebay, the Takara figure I can't pass up, or the Third Party toys of characters I couldn't get before. I'd say eighty percent of my recent purchases were either third party figures on sale or KOs, not because I didn't want to buy Hasbro's items, but because I COULDN'T! I couldn't find them in stores and I wasn't going to pay forty dollars for a scout-class figure like Windcharger!!!! For example.
The part about this hobby that was the most fun to me was walking into a store, seeing an awesome figure on the shelf, geeking out and buying the damn thing by impulse. Now its a stressful hunt-slash-race to the finish line or you will never get what you want.
...Hasbro, you are killing Transformers for me. There I said it.
Sorry for the rant guys...