I'll just leave the options to you as a poll didn't work well, LOL.
My least fave overall was Headmasters. Talk about a show where I had to have a six pack for each Ep. Seemed like there were a billion things going on at once in each Ep too.

 

Probably IDW. Thank the Generations/Combiner Wars toys for introducing me to that stuff.

 

BeastWars was hard to watch.

 

Beast Machines.

 

Could not sit through Prime. It was pretty boring, despite some interesting concepts.

 

Hard to say...I think Prime was the first TF series I never could finish, despite sitting thru all of Superlink. But I also had low expecting to begin with on SL, and probably set my expectations too high on Prime. Prime had some great concepts and interesting characters, but it never went anywhere with them.

 

Animated, Prime, and Energon. Animated's tone just got on my nerves, along with the character designs. It did have some of the best voice acting in the brand, though. I'd say it's second to Beast Machines in how well it's voice acting was done.
Energon had one of the worst stores I've ever watched, and the characters were not enjoyable at all.
Prime certainly did not have a good casting director. Wheeljack and Ultra Magnus' voice actors were the only VAs in the show that I felt did a good job, and actually went really well with their character's personalities. Prime had some of the worst Decepticons I've ever seen (A mute and OP Soundwave, a Megatron who never did anything besides bitch and groan at his troops when their failures were thanks to his flawed strategies, and Breakdown, who was just there and died). The Autobots had almost nothing good to talk about as well.

 

Prime. It did everything that a Transformers cartoon never should do as if running down a checklist of awful ideas one after another.

Superlink is actually the better version because it's the original script and everything happens for a reason. Mostly.

Energon is much, much worse because an ungodly amount of stuff was lost in translation such as the running joke about everybody forgetting Superion's name all the time (which is why he keeps bellowing it out randomly in the dub for no reason).

 

Energon, Cybertron, and Armada. For me, these are lumped together as Complete Unwatchable Disgustitude.

I have a feeling the opinions in this thread are going to be all over the map.   Mostly because even though every incarnation of "Transformers" is basically the same rough idea, the end results are so incredibly different from one another!

So different, that a fan can easily have a scale that includes complete adoration, absolute revulsion, and every varying degree inbetween.

I can't think of any other animated franchise,mostly geared towards children, that has such an insane multitude of different incarnations. Even He-Man only had 3!

*edit
Whoops, nevermind, I forgot about Batman. He has had a zillion.

 

Probably Prime. Energon is absolutely far and away the worst TF show, but it's so bad you detach yourself almost instantly. I was never invested, I never anticipated what happened next. I can't even watch it and feel anything as it feels like it's unfinished animatics for a much nicer looking show. (even when it is finished and at it's best)

Prime had me by the cat-balls. I still think Darkness Rising is damn near perfect. But it became so unpleasant with how these series just ruined every good thing it had going for it, I honestly enjoy it less than Energon because I actually cared immensely for it at one point.

More like everything happens in a way that, without context, could be believed to be working towards events that succeed it, and likewise feel driven by event preceeding it.

It isn't of course. It's total nonsense through and through, but it has the fallacy of direction.

 

So far there's not a TF series I couldn't stand watching though Armada's first half came close but even then it moved away form the bad elements and got better. there's also Beast Machines but that's more on how it didn't do a good job with keeping the BW characters intact and felt out of character.

 

This for sure for me as far as Comics go.

As for TV I'd have to say that Beast Machines just barely beats out the Unicron Trilogy for my least favorite.

 

Beast Machines was a huge kick in the lug nuts.

 

Armada/Energon/Cybertron. I've tried on several occasions and I've yet to make it the whole way through a single episode of any of them.

 

I wasn't too big a fan of the "Beast Wars/Machines" era but I can at least appreciate it for what it is, what it tried to do, what it contributed to the franchise, and just keeping TF alive and viable in general.

And I'm a HUGE fan of the live action movies, obviously. So they've been easy enough to enjoy. G1 gets a free pass for innovation, fun, and nostalgia purposes.

"TF: Prime" was AWESOME, it gets shit on WAY too hard and WAY too much. "TF: Animated" was cool, just not really my jam.

Which leaves the Unicron Trilogy.

UGH.

I was honestly just excited to see there were new TF cartoons and even though I was ostensibly an adult I TRIED LIKE HELL to get into them.

I'd pretty much rather exterminate all life on planet Earth before trying to sit through that garbage.

-____-

 

I would've said Energon but I barely watched it. For me it's Animated because it was the perfect example of how to disgrace a franchise. It was like a cheap happy meal tie-in. I'm still convinced to this day it wasn't meant to be a TF how at first, but it got slapped on late in production and they had to roll with it.

 

What about Gundam? A series that has had so many incarnations it literally had an incarnation about its own incarnations?


Twice?

That's what ultimately puts Prime below Energon for me. Energon at least is shit from the get go - Prime actually shows great potential and spits it in my face a third of the way in for pointless artifact hunting and Megatron suddenly thinking humans pushing buttons are nuclear-grade WMD powers.

 

Just so you know, I sent your other thread to la la land.  



On this topic: Without a doubt, Energon.

 

Could you give an example of this? A great many would disagree, with substanical evidence to the contrary.

What exactly does this mean? The show had no relation to McDonalds beyond any other series.

This is factually incorrect. It was intended to be a TF show before it was even Animated.

 

Transformers Prime.

It started good and then it's like the staff had no clue what they wanted to do. The Decepticons were made up to be this great threat and yet it took an warship to knocked out one Autobot in the first episode. In the other episodes, the Autobots basically went through the cons all the time. A far cry from Animated when the cons were legit threats for even the strongest Autobots.

Then there's season two which became one pointless seek and find. Then there's season three, which was applied that there would of been a massive Predacon army. No, Shockwave was made to destroy them and only Predaking was the only until the movie.

Finally the characters, I never connected to them. In Animated, each character had an interesting history and development throughout the series. In TFP, I grew bored with basically the entire Autobot team and most of the cons. Arcee never changed going from "MY PARTNERS ARE DEAD!!!" to Starscream and then again with Airachnid. Bulkhead had this apparent history with Breakdown that was never shown. Prime felt emotionless and boring to me. Ratchet was a grumpy meme. Bumblebee was so annoying acting like R2D2 throughout the series. Then the later characters like Smokescreen didn't really add anything to me.

The cons were barely any better overall to me.

Then there's the lines. Great series comes with it's own memorable lines. This didn't, it just kept on using lines from the 86 movie most of the time. It took something that was epic and made it boring.