Well, guys, I caved! After seeing some reviews on YouTube, seeing the pictures in this thread, and then seeing the figures in stores (Walmart and Target) here in the Twin Cities, I went ahead and bought Bumblebee, Ratchet, and Starscream, restarting my collection of live action movie figures again. I had sold off my movie figures for the first time when things took a down-turn after Dark of the Moon. I started picking some up again after Age of Extinction (because Hound and Dinobots), and then I sold them off again when I decided to focus instead on G1 Generations and Masterpiece. Now, here I am again. I'm really going to try and pace myself this time and be patient, filling out most of my new collection with the Studio Series and sticking to only on-screen characters.
With that said, I've got some initial first impressions of my inaugural haul. Bumblebee is my least favorite of the three. I do like his smallish size, but I feel he's a bit overpriced at $19.99. The paint work is great, but the figure itself suffers from pieces popping off all the freaking time, like his forearms and especially pieces of his car roof and hood! The transformation is fairly intuitive, if fiddly. I got most of it down without need for the instructions at all. The part that tripped me up for almost a half hour was getting the car hood to snap into place. After staring at the unhelpful diagram in the instructions, showing it magically clicking into place, studying a YouTube video, and looking at pictures on the internet of the toy from all sorts of angles, I finally figure out that you kind of have to "smoosh" the grill of the hood through the space between the headlight, not pull it down over it.
Ratchet is much better than Bumblebee in my opinion. His transformation was easy to figure out without the instructions. The paint job is also good. He's bigger than Bumblebee by quite a bit for them being the same size class. The only part that was a little scary was initially turning the front chunk of the Hummer around for transformation to vehicle mode. That simple twist joint was VERY tight, and I thought I might be doing damage to my figure, but all is well. Transforming him back, that joint seemed to move much more easily. The only criticisms I have are that Ratchet should have maybe been a bit bigger still. If that wasn't something Hasbro and Takara could have pulled off in Deluxe scale, maybe they should have made him a smaller Voyager figure with more accessories. Again, he's a bit pricy at $19.99, but a better value than Bumblebee.
Last but certainly not least is Starscream. He is amazing! He looks the part, and he's got the good Movie 1 paintjob that I prefer over the tattooed look from RotF onward. I love that they straight up borrowed the engineering from the Deluxe DotM toy. That was a great design, and having it in Voyager scale has created, at last, the perfect Movie Starscream toy (besides the Leader class/"Masterpiece version). I appreciate too that the alt mode is so well done for a jet transformer. Yes, there is still a bunch of kibble under the plane, but it doesn't look like a robot laying down on his belly with an airplane on his back. All of Starscream's parts fold up neatly and snuggly. Most of the kibble tabs together perfectly, and no space is wasted either. He looks good from the front, from the sides, and from behind. Most jet Transformers nowadays can only create the illusion from a top down perspective. The ONLY thing that I find sad with Starscream is that he only comes with ONE missile rack accessory instead of two. I would want two just to put them under the wings and have symmetry in alt mode. Starscream is nice and big for a contemporary Voyager figure too. The plastic feels nice and sturdy too, and he doesn't have any soft "rubbery" parts either. He's easily worth the $29.99 MSRP.
I'd say this Starscream is the biggest reason I even entertained getting into collecting the movie figures for a third time. I hope we get some exciting reveals in the coming months (SDCC, perhaps?) that show that the Studio Series line has legs to go the distance and give us most of the major on-screen characters for the live action movies to date!
)
Also I'm probably gonna need more shelves. I love the backdrops so much but they do require a tad more space rather than smooshing as many figures as I can into tight spaces but I should be displaying them all neatly anyways and yeah..shelves... need more. The backdrops make it like the figures are halfway displayed boxed but open at the same time. Neat but easily accessible to pick the figure out and play with it. 
