i dunno, from my history with TFs, i'd ,much prefer ball-jointed ankles to these weird "flap feet" a lot of Siege has ~ they give you multiple directions of tilt and provide a lot more options for dynamic posing, and look way more natural/less strange. That said, the current era's QC is so consistently poor that i suppose the likely hood of issues with loose joints isn't worth the risk.
It’s not a deal breaker, but I far prefer nonface plated characters to have some kind of facial expression. having a facial expression is one of the big reasons I bought Siege Thundercracker even though I’m very unfamiliar with the character, and because he’s my favorite color.
Indeed, the new MP Hound comes to mind. To me he doesn't really have a butterfly joint, you are just untabbing his shoulder out of his socket. That and the majority of "ab crunches".
I'm not just talking about posing, I'm talking about when hasbro designed the arm with an inward elbow and when you turn the arm, the sculpting looks bad and the hand is permanently palms upward.
I have grown tired of lazy, "close enough" alt-modes. Don't get me wrong - you can get a big buy by declaring something a space ship or Cybertronian mode, and I will go along with it to a great extent, but at a certain point, it looks like nothing or looks like it's *almost* something, but not quite. I'll admit it, I am a G1 guy, and I appreciated back then when they'd sacrifice almost anything from the bot-mode to get a great alt-modes. It spoiled me. I am willing to meet in the middle, and understand some fudging on alt-modes to make a better looking bot, but sometimes the invention of "vehicles" for the alt-modes is such an obvious afterthought that it irks me.
That stupid 'sit-up piece' of Astrotrain's shuttle pad might be the first time I ever 'fix' a WFC figure... It's bugging me already and I haven't even got the thing yet!
I'd argue for toe tilts, only Six-gun has one, but it's a very weak joint for Transformation, however it's awesome. If you're into posing your bots toe tilts are amazing.
I think the other joints in the Mcfarlene figures are more responsible for issues standing. I handled my stepson's Fortnite figures and I'd say they just don't pose as well, as say Black Series The Mandalorian (Specifically), mostly the hips are limited.
I was thinking in general, whatever the toyline, but certainly the stature of a figure can mean they're almost essential or desirable. Like say NECA's Alien 3 Dog Alien, where you'd wanna recreate the running look.
Tabs on transparent plastic anything that requires the plastic to have to intentionally flex to go from one mode to the other friction joints on load bearing structures long, relatively thing stems/armatures that have a lot of mass at the end 'C' clips And... I'll edit this to add things as I think of them.
Not sure how common this is, but one thing that I hate was with something like Siege Apeface's weird rear jet wings-shield thing, where the part was casted in translucent plastic painted in a completely different color, rather than just directly cast the part itself in its supposed color. Just.... why? The entire piece was supposed to be in red, so why wasn't the part just straight up just been molded with red plastic directly instead of wasting paint to paint a part into its intended color? Speaking of molded with plastic, I also hate when the handle of a weapon part was casted with brittle translucent plastic. Once the handle shows signs of damages, they're a breakage of part waiting to happen.
Figures that require the pelvis to split for transformation tend to bother me a lot. The biggest offender I can think of is Cybertron Menasor. To this day I can't get the two sides to stay closed in bot mode.
Thankfully, they don't do that as often anymore. Nowadays, the limbs collapse through different series of hinges and swivels arranged in different ways.
