Every company, hell, every project is going to have a different way of sorting out a budget. I'm sure there's not an excel spreadsheet that has pages with tabs names for each toy and a line that says "Paint".

However I'd be willing to wager that within a toy line, each price point has a target cost for product design, mold creation, plastic costs, assembly costs, paint costs, and so forth. I would hope that designers have a lot of control through the process, but there's always going to be a manager that wants to get more product for less cost. If that can't be done, the same product for less cost. I could well see a manager being told by his boss that the big wigs want to find a way to save 12 cents per unit and that we've gotta squeeze that out somewhere.

And not to be that guy but after being around the block with a few companies, what gets taught at school often rapidly gets pitched under a bus in industry. Of course in a toy design course the instructor is going to say that designers have all the control. There'd be a whole lot less enthusiasm if the prof said "Well, you're going to have all these great ideas that a bean counter is going to crap a steaming pile on then tell you to get back to making more spinny top things, because that's what parents are buying this season."

Iffins it happens next time. I'd love to host something, but not 24 hours of something. I wanted to die. All the way to dead.

Fuck that guy. Tell her a nice guy on the Internet said that.

Some people are jerks, and some people are Transformers fans. Unfortunately the Venn diagram of those two groups sometimes overlap. It's best to forget about the jerks, and remember the cool people.

 

Another great suggestion to dip your toes in the fandom is to look for a local meetup of fans, it's going to be way smaller than a convention, and you may even find like minded friends at a comic shop too. I work at a local comic shop occasionally, just pricing and organizing TF's, so anytime I see someone new looking at them I'll try to start a conversation. If it fails, I'll let it go, if it sparks, I'll let them know about the next meetup. Sometimes people come, other times they are noticeably disturbed that a real live human person is trying to have conversation about something their interested in. It's cool though, it's part of life.

As for Scattorshot, I'm wondering if someone from the business end saw the mockup of him in dark red and regular red and said something like "But why doesn't it match?" and that became the focus. Hopefully when we see an image for this upcoming "Computron" listing it'll shine some light, though I'm honestly expecting that torso to be the exact same figure as the one currently in my collection. I wish they had been able to use the Cyclonus chest and combiner chest. That would've gone a long way in making all 3 versions of this mold still feel very different, but I'm betting the molds just couldn't be produced in that manner.

 

Factory shenanigans are always a potential issue too. If you look at Playmates and how the Turtles get screwed over its rough. Paint apps disappear and when the designers are asked about it they say that the factory just decided not to apply them, but nobody found out about it until cases are being opened in the store. I think where the difference comes in is that Hasbro has representatives that they have on hand in the factory to do spot checks at the point of manufacture. It's a whole lot easier to catch paint out of place if you look at it out of the paint machine, than once it's made its way across an ocean.

As far as real life vs. school life, yeah, sorry. :/