Agreed. This would be on of the few times that I actually would blame Hasbro for the distribution woes of this line - not because they're in
charge of distribution (they're still not
) but because their wave assortments were probably the worst decision made in recent years.
Front-ending the line with a character that had literally 5 seconds of screentime, a repaint of the least-recognisable and arguably worst-looking Dinobot from AoE, yet
another Bumblebee who is an objectively-inferior repaint and not even the new mold they
made for this movie, and exactly one new mold of a character that had any significant ("significant") presence in the film... yeah, Hasbro
really shot themselves in the foot from the get-go this time around. Even the Voyagers are the same trend, albeit to a lesser extent - nobody wanted a boring-colored (if movie-accurate) Grimlock repaint and the Optimus, while an okay decision since Optimus is always a decently safe bet, didn't actually do anything to help since the accompanying Grimlocks still had to move before stores would restock with another (hopefully newer) shipment.
At this point I've all but given up hope of seeing Deluxes past Wave 1 near me - every single store still has a Slash and Berserker or two clogging the pegs - and while I managed to find all Voyager waves by total fluke, it was just the one case of Wave 3 and now we're back to Hounds and Grimlocks everywhere again. I just hope that the lesson Hasbro "learns" from this doesn't end up being "well the Generations-style toys from TLK didn't sell well, so I guess nobody wants them and we should stop making them". Hopefully they get the message as intended - we don't like repaints of stuff we already have, it's not that we don't like good Movie toys. The problem with voting with one's wallet is that wallets are notoriously inarticulate
(On another note, since I picked up the Grimlock repaint on sale a couple weeks ago I now technically have
every Voyager released under the TLK line. Maybe I'll do an ultimate-Voyager-comparison post or something when I can be bothered. Spoilers, Grimlock and Prime are at the bottom and everyone else is at the top.)