TransFormers toylines - An Alternate Pitch

I decided against attending the recent MCM London Comic Con on the Saturday, despite the fact that the Hasbro panel that day may have made an ideal lead-in to this piece. A friend of mine was going on the Friday and, despite having the day off work, I didn't feel up to the crowds. We'd discussed meeting up for the Sunday instead, but he ended up deciding against, despite the planned Doctor Who panels, which he had been interested in.

Of course, it transpired that Hasbro revealed nothing in their TransFormers panel that hadn't already been online for a few weeks aside from some BotBots wackiness that was of no interest to me... and the most significant thing on their large stand was the complete-but-mistransformed Studio Series Devastator.

While the War for Cybertron: Earthrise toyline seems marginally more interesting to me than Siege was (albeit because I can treat just it as a continuation of Classics, and ideally pick up toys of characters I don't already have or just weren't done well back in that line), there's still something bugging me about the way Hasbro handles TransFormers, generally, these days. I've rambled about this in the past, but haven't necessarily had any specific ideas of my own, other than "Grrr. BotBots are silly! Do not want!"

Until now.

Strap in, people... this is a bit of a long one, even by my standards...