If the transition from the old characters to the new characters was the main reason why people don't like Headmasters, then said people would also not like the '86 movie and Season 3 of G1.

The problem isn't the fact that new characters are taking the place of the old ones, the problem is how it is executed. With the exception of Optimus (I guess?), none of the legacy characters get a satisfying send-off. Its very clear when watching the show that the writers didn't care about these characters or their stories.

They just wanted to advertise the new toys and get their paycheck. There is a notable lack of passion present in Headmasters, that was evident in the American cartoon and even follow-ups like Masterforce.

It doesn't help that most of the new characters aren't all that entertaining. They're bland at best and annoying at worst. Sure, some of the show's stories and characters could be interesting, but more often than not it's potential is squandered by piss-poor execution.

The Decepticons were pretty alright overall though, I'll agree with you there. Sixshot was the stand-out character, for sure.

 

If your takeaway for why people have been criticizing Headmasters is that it's not G1, that they think G1 is a "masterpiece" or that they don't understand the point/intent/value of the things that Headmasters did, I feel like you weren't really paying attention to the arguments and you came in with the attitude that you like the show, so there's something wrong or faulty in the criticisms of people who don't.

I was very clear about why I didn't like the series:

1) The characters were either annoying jerks who engendered no sympathy or attachment (and in lieu of working to earn it they simply resorted to having the narrator and other characters constantly tell us that they were interesting and engaging characters that we should like, which is an awful way to go about things.) or they were bland, personality-free cardboard cutouts who filled the role of either generically evil goon or vanilla "good soldier" hero. Most of the characters from previous series (when they showed up for any length of time) were radically altered from their original incarnations for no good reason and made less interesting in the process. Blurr went from being jittery and excitable to a stuttering coward. Blaster went from a cool, fun-loving, gregarious hip bot to a boring rank-and-file army officer. Galvatron was reverted to his cold, ruthless Movie incarnation (which is baffling considering Japan didn't even have the Movie to draw on for his characterization until like 3 years after this show) and rarely ever displayed the unhinged, unstable traits of his G1 Season 3 personality. Spike randomly was made into a scientist for what little he contributed to the plot. Carly lost all of her spunk and adventurous/capable spirit and became a fretting, doting housewife. Cyclonus and Scourge went from legitimate threats and possibly the only thing that held Crazy Galvatron™'s leadership bid together to being bumbling comedy oafs on the scale of Rocksteady & Bebop or Team Rocket. And perhaps most damning, Arcee was morphed from a competent, confident warrior who could keep up with the boys into a a willowy bundle of simpering, bawling nerves who was relegated to being a glorified secretary/medic/babysitter for little discernible reason besides what looks an awful lot like "that's a woman's place. not on the battlefield" value judgements. Even Rodimus lost all his self-doubt and buckling under the pressure of succeeding Optimus so he could become a stoic, bland, vanilla guy-in-charge just long enough to leave the show. Honestly, the only G1 character who gets to keep something resembling their original personality is Kup. And that's seemingly because "crotchety, senile old codger" is pretty much a universal trope.

G1 was bursting at the seams with colorful characters full of big, loud personalities that could come across in as little as their voice/accent/mannerisms or as much as a dedicated spotlight episode. Almost anyone who got any real screentime got to be something potentially memorable. Compare that to Headmasters. Of the 5 core Autobot Headmasters only Fortress and Chromedome get anything resembling complete characterization. Hardhead is like Chromedome lite and he only exists to stand next to Chromedome and be his yes-man whenever our gallant hero decides that his hot-blooded, burning-justice nature can't stand whatever atrocity of the week has his robo-dander up. Highbrow kind of gets to be the tech nerd, but that's limited to allegedly making a video game for Daniel, adjusting his video game laser pistol into a real weapon in a stunning display of poor guardianship, and being given the duty of figuring out Scorponok's weakness. Except he doesn't do the last one because he pawns it off on Chromedome, who promptly figures it out because even though he's not the sciency/brainy guy of the bunch, he is the focal heroic character so he has to be made to look even better by triumphing where his comrade failed. And Brainstorm? Good luck figuring out if he even had a personality. He was there from the very beginning of the show and appeared in most episodes, but was so ancillary that he pretty much literally could've been replaced by a cardboard cutout and nothing of value would've been lost. he was just there as window dressing and to give the Autobot Headmasters a 4th/5th character to be a heavy lifter in terms of group combat scenes.

2) The storytelling structure was littered with problems. For a show that had 35 episodes to tell its story, it certainly had issues getting it out in a smooth, consistent pace. plots were stop-start, Galvatron's return seemed like it was meant to do very little besides pad out the episode count and stall for time before the finale. And while they should've had more than enough runway to tell their whole story, they resorted far too often to the narrator just dumping plot advancement on us in transitional scenes. Which is lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy.

G1 may have been full of holes and underwhelming stories, but it was also an episodic show with a specific editorial edict to avoid being complicated or bogging episodes down with plot and anything that might distract from the action. And it was written by a mercenary team of writers who have often made no bones about the fact that they knew they were working for a glorified toy commercial and didn't care about the quality of their work as long as they could churn out a script in a few days and fire it off to the producers like so much production-line sausage. By all rights it's a testament to the quality of the franchise and its strength as a brand that it was able to produce as much enjoyable content under those constraints as it did. Lord knows that a ton of other 80s cartoons in a similar boat didn't come away with nearly as much enduring popularity. Comparatively, Headmasters intended to tell a serialized story from the get go. It did so with a head writer overseeing the entirety of its plot, and with a small stable of primary staff writers (no more than 3, IIRC) who oversaw all aspects of the series as it was written. And yet in spite of that they couldn't even manage to keep themselves smoothly on track.

3) You talk about all the big risks and shakeups that the story takes, and I'll admit I did praise them for at least going there. But the problem is that none of them have lasting impact. Optimus died in G1 and it hung over the entirety of season 3, largely in the form of Rodimus' crippling self-doubt and inferiority complex. He dies here and is promptly forgotten. Cybertron blows up and once Rodimus, Kup, and Blurr take off into the cosmos to find a new planet (never to return except in the manga adaptation) it's mourned for all of about 1 act of the next episode and then never important again. Mars blows up and then that event becomes so forgotten that before the end of this series there are even computer displays of the solar system that very clearly still show it on the screen (And then it shows up again in Victory even though there's no way it should've still been intact at that point). Galvatron's death then reveal of being alive then death again are, as I said, mostly a stall tactic. Even the revelation that the destruction of 2 major planets has destabilized the space bridge network is played for drama for like a few scant minutes until it's tossed away by Chromedome using what looks for all the world like a space bridge to travel across the distance between planets so he can arrive in time for a big fight, totally undoing the whole point of introducing that quirk as a means of creating drama by "we can't just use the space bridge to pop between Earth and Athenia anymore). The deaths of characters like Abel and Jack are undercut by the fact that we only learn about them existing in the episode we see them die in and learn nothing about them beyond "they're important to Chromedome". And Galvatron's plan to absorb the Earth is grand in scale, but also so gallingly stupid looking that I wish I could've seen the writer's room when the concept was pitched and nobody raised an objection to how utterly dumb it came across. Because the only way I can see something like that being done with a straight face was if one of the writers pitched it as a joke, then when everyone else took it seriously he became too afraid of offending them to admit it was just a gag suggestion. All these big things happen, but none of them ever seem to matter beyond one specific, small scale payoff. If that much.

So if I don't like the characters, don't like the story structure, and don't like the 'aim big, fall short' aspect of all the twists, what's left to like about the show?

To be honest, it's not TERRIBLE. It's certainly better than what I remember of the worst parts of the Unicron Trilogy or the Prime Wars Trilogy. Its biggest sin is that it's both boring and that it squanders the limitless potential it had to build on G1 as a true sequel series. And then the franchise only gets further away from its roots with Masterforce (a far better show both technically and entertainment-wise, but one that at times felt like it wanted to be anything but a Transformers series) and Victory (a bit of a return to classic Transformers, and so far has been decent and entertaining in the 1/8th of the series I've watched to this point, but which also tends to revel in its anime-esque roots more than its Transformers ones at times)

I don't blame people who want to like it, but I also can't agree that it's a show that lacks faults worthy of criticism or that it sits on par with G1 and that slagging this show has to represent also taking the nostalgia blinders off and slagging G1 as well.

 

That last paragraph reminds me of the one or two episodes of SuperLink that I watched from the TV-Nihon subs and they made a point of keeping the suffix "-tachi" with an author's note of "tachi means 'and company' and is used to address groups" for the line "follow me-tachi!".

I wanted to bang my head against my desk because that's an easy fix. English isn't that picky about subject-verb agreement in that context. Or at least it's a case where the sentence "Follow me!" is perfectly valid when referring to both single people and groups. You don't need the damned "-tachi" except to show off and go "this is part of my anime nerd lexicon and you should use it too!".

It's basically the equivalent to that silly "all according to keikaku (t/n: keikaku means plan)" meme and is why we get junk like fan-translators leaving words like "baka" or "hai" untranslated for 'flavor' reasons, or silly confusions that end in TVTropes having formerly had a trope named "nakama" because some One Piece fansubbers got it in their heads that this was an untranslatable word with deep, multi-faceted meaning that couldn't be conveyed with the same poetic sense in English because it meant "a group of unrelated people who were more than friends, but not blood-related family but who had a deep and familial bond and sense of loyalty to one another" when the reality is that it just means "group/crew/friends/comrades" with no fancy extra meaning.

Translation exists to make things as accessible as possible to the audience in the appropriate language and should be done by preserving tone and intent above literal correctness or awkward misgivings about whether the imagery of the original phrase is "better" than its translated equivalent (I see this a lot for idioms and metaphors and whatever. Bad translators leave an idiom in its literal form even though it makes no sense to the new audience, and even when an equivalent version exists in the new language. For example I've seen "one's act, one's profit" or "evil cause, evil effect" because they sound poetic and evocative even though it would probably be much clearer in most cases to use something like "you reap what you sow" or "you get what you give" or an of a handful of English idioms for "you will receive an appropriate reward for whatever good/bad things you have done" types of thoughts.)

It's one of the reasons I appreciate what I've seen so far of Karyuudo's translations of stuff like Zone, the Japanese Beast Wars series, or the little bit of the Unicron Trilogy that they did. There's no fluff, no weeby undertones, no gatekeeping. Just a good, solid effort to make sure that English speakers watching the show can understand as much as possible even if they aren't giant anime/Japanese culture nerds to begin with.

 

I keep forgetting about that. Considering all the crap that Chromedome has to go through in the series, I find it a bit weird how much people give him flak. In some ways he feels like a continuation of the theme of maturation they tried to pull off with Rodimus Prime in season 3, except unlike that one, this one doesn't get undone in the last minute because they have to bring back his predecessor.

I think Daniel is one of the few things about Headmasters I do genuinely dislike. He was pretty annoying in season 3, but he goes through some serious age regression between the two shows, apparently just so they can try doing the whole theme of growing up with him as well - which as an idea isn't too bad, I just wish they hadn't gone so far as to have him bawling like an infant in the early episodes.