How sad. Six pages of discussion and it seems the only reason anyone's coming up with is, "It's a toy commercial." How tedious is that? I could use that excuse for everything that was done in the cartoon.
Why were Megatron and Starscream best frenemies? Because they had to make them interesting to sell toys.
Why does Omega Supreme hate Devastator? So you'll buy both toys.

See? We all know the real-world reasons why certain things are done in a show, but if you don't want to ever carry the discussion beyond that, then it's going to be a very short, very dull conversation. . . unless you're a fan that's in it solely for the toys and doesn't care about the fiction.

As a counter-example...
There's a G1 episode where Sideswipe appears next to Megatron in the Decepticon HQ. He's just hanging out there with the 'cons like they're buddies. Now, I could say it's just an animation error, and that would probably be the truth. But how boring. I could just as easily say it was a Decepticon trying out some hologram technology that made him look like Sideswipe. There we go. An in-story explanation for why something is the way it is.

Yes, it's a fan-theory. This is what we do all the time though. We don't need to rely on Hasbro/Takara or some other official source to feed us all the answers all the time.

 

The thing that bothers me the most was that the Decepticon attack force looked small, and yet they managed to destroy most of the defenses (seriously the Autobot city had a lot of guns).

 

I had the exact same reaction. You'd think people in a toy fandom would have a bit more imagination. Besides that, the whole "it's a commercial!" garbage is really insulting to the amount of work that goes into a cartoon.