Here's the thing: Jetfire/Skyfire, being a reskinned
Macross Valkyrie, is a single-bodied humanoid Transformer whose legs, chest, and to a lesser degree arms, all have a straightforward disposition in vehicle mode. Sky Lynx is a Transformer who is made up of two separate components each with their own separate bestial robot mode that then combine to make a large, quadrupedal robot mode; I think there's more inherent complexity to him even without the base mode, just from all the extra joints his neck and beast limbs need to articulate (his transformations themselves aren't
that complex from the look of it). And SIEGE Jetfire does have intricacies to his transformation that you wouldn't expect given the base design.
SIEGE Jetfire
is an $80 toy because he is of comparable mass (from what I've read, mass is the biggest governing factor on prices; engineering doesn't make as much of a difference unless it's aggressively simplified like with
Cyberverse) to, and within the same minimum complexity range, as
Armada Unicron and
Cybertron Primus, who were $50 toys in 2003 and 2005 but would be $80 toys today because of prices creeping upward even as Transformers on average diminished in mass beginning around Dark of the Moon. SIEGE Jetfire's price is but a symptom of that underlying phenomenon.
As far as I'm concerned, T30 Jetfire is a horrendous joke. In one mode at least, he
is cartoon accurate... which is his utter undoing. The integration level is just as low as
Revenge of the Fallen Jetfire, all because he stupidly tries to have both the G1 cartoon robot mode and the Macross jet mode.
Calling him a superior toy to the SIEGE figure is like calling Earthrise Arcee superior to T30 or
Animated Arcee. T30 Jetfire is, IMO, inferior to not only the SIEGE version, but the
Classics Voyager version, the
Titanium Series version, and the redeco of
Legends of Cybertron Thundercracker.
That is how low he rates in my book. If he had been a hybridized design like the Classics figure, or a redesign like the Titanium Series, or a reinvention I would find him to be a better toy. But instead he tries to be two contradictory designs at once, and ends up a mess...
Somewhat more on topic for this thread: Has anyone else ordered from a China-based seller recently? What's the shipping time been like?
.
ROTF Leader Prime cost $45 at the time of his release, a mere $5 up from the $40 that 
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