I enjoyed the first trilogy somewhat but like many people despised the unnecessary humor and lack of robot characterization. Countless of us have bitched about that from day one online.

This movie whether you liked it or not made a huge effort to correct these issues. For many I know it wasn't enough, but for me it was. I loved this movie and because the autobots had more lines and character I overlooked a lot of errors. For me I got what I had been bitching about so I guess for the first time I left a transformers movie not disappointed and genuinely excited.

Do you think it's a coincidence or does Bay really try to please fans?

 

I think they really did try to improve based on fan suggestions. The new full of personality autobots, less wacky stupid humor, no more military worship.

But they still don't quite have it down. As other have mentioned Bay doesn't seem to "get" it but gave what he thought people wanted anyway. Like the whole military and big business conspiricy thing. It's rather disjointed and Grammer seems to vary between scumbag and actually believing in what he's saying scene to scene. As if Bay finally caught on to most other films and the public not really caring for government or military these days so he tossed that in, but he doesn't really believe it himself so he's just doing what he thinks will be viewed as "Hey guys this is relevant right?"

 

I agree there is room for improvement i am just pleased that when compared to the previous ones this one at the very least addressed what I cared about most.

 

Definitely. It's not perfect by any means, and I doubt it ever will be, but it's pretty clear they're paying attention to fan criticism. For instance:
- more human-like faces, as opposed to bug-like
- TFs being more visually distinct from each other
- TFs getting more screentime and dialogue
- less toilet/weird/immature humor
- less shaky cam

Granted a lot of these could and should have been done since day one, but better late (and with guaranteed sequels) than never I suppose.

EDIT: Oh, and Lockdown and other feeling like their old selves instead of new guys that just share a name. And, to a lesser degree, how Lockdown killing Ratchet and Megatron's head manipulating unwitting humans felt like genuine loving nods to Animated (yay, a non-G1 reference!).

 

I think so too

 

They're either listening to fans or they're actually becoming fans of this franchise. Both possibilities seem roughly equal in their likeliness-to-unlikeliness ratio to me. But I definitely enjoyed this one more than the other three, for the same reasons Noideaforaname mentioned.

 

Yes, all of this is what I meant, I hope they really do care because I am starting to feel that way.