You know, since that thread was closed, and you seem like a reasonable person, I find your post fascinating since I probably have the complete opposite opinion. I found half of the interactions between the 2007 Transformers extremely shallow and unnatural and the AoE robots' to have much more to their characters and feel much more natural.
Thank you for calling me reasonable, right back at ya! It can be hard sometimes to find reasonable people. Anyway, I agree that they had more chemistry, but their interactions kinda seemed pointless to me. Almost like they were only there for comic relief or something like that. I also strongly disliked Hounds lines. Almost every single one. It's a shame, because I really like John Goodman, so I was expecting better.
Personally, I loved them, because they all had reasons for being the way they were and had both good and bad qualities, just like us as humans. They made sense and were relatable to me. But hey, we don't all want the same thing in our robots, and I think there's room in Transformers fiction for a variety of robot casts.