Mylenium

Turnover beats revenue/ grosses. The no. 1 rule of all retail business. That's basically all that matters. And given that many small sets are produced in the millions vs. only a few tens of thousands on most bigger sets, that sure carries weight. Yes, of course, we all could anecdotally cite situations where we were jealous of someone carrying multiple 200+ Euro sets out of a LEGO store, but it's probably nothing compared to the wider market. The example that stuck with me is when a few years ago LEGO revealed how many UCS Millenium Falcons were sold in Europe. It was only around 10000 at that point. Now consider that these packages have actual higher manufacturing cost due to the sheer number of pieces, the elaborate packaging and manuals, are mostly hand packaged and so on and weigh that against what you can earn with them, given the numbers. Point in case: The profit margins very likely aren't as impressive as people may think and not above what you can make with the same number of pieces automatically packed into smaller sets. Beyond LEGO of course charging a premium compared to competitors I would imagine that their grosses across the board balance out and they don't cash in exorbitant amounts on some big sets. And you don't even need to be too skittish about the numbers or the age demographic. There's tons of users who will buy multiple packages even of cheap sets, which offsets the reduced income. Just think about some Star Wars battle packs of which some users have bought 20 or 50. Or stuff like the upcoming Forest Animals: Red Fox (31154). Even I, despite my limited finances, plan to get at least two of those as do I for some other sets. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that LEGO don't need to sell big sets to make their billions of revenue every year. Mylenium

Not up to speed on the latest "fads", but e.g. when "The Mandalorian" first came out there were loads and loads of MOCs for the Razor Crest, Grogu/ The Child and his crib, other vehicles and props, many of which seemed to be motivated by commercial interests and/ or ego stroking about being the first, not necessarily the builders' own fandom. Rinse repeat for other movies TV series etc.. Even when LEGO bring out a set there's often about a dozen MOCs/ MODs only a few days later with everyone trying to "fix" what they perceive as wrong or a shortcoming, usually for big expensive sets more than small ones. You can really observe these waves rippling through the communities... Mylenium

Simply knowledge and experience. You have to have built a bunch of sets with diverse elements plus you should at least know where to look for specific parts on Bricklink. Again experience, but combined with a good grasp of engineering and design principles plus a lot of experimentation. Occasionally, but I don't do "LEGO sketching". It's one of the most critical principles you get taught at any arts/ design school: Consider the medium and pick the right one, but don't let your creativity be limited by it. If you're too specific you lock yourself into a certain mindset that prevents you from exploring alternate solutions because you're trying too hard to make your (potentially flawed) design work. I don't do "real life". Trying to re-create an object like a Polaroid camera or a vehicle as an exact replica couldn't be any more uninteresting to me. Instead it's about abstraction, reduction and/ or freely exploring ideas and designs. For the rest you can buy enough sets already to put another model on your shelf to catch dust. Ideas come first. Even when I was more on the engineering side and did Technic I always had to have a concrete use case to even get started. Of course not everything turns out as expected and quite generally I'm a lazy builder whose projects often end up unfinished, but at least I always had good intentions I would argue... ;-) Mylenium

Some people don't know better and eventually even the biggest BL vendor will run out of stock. Different priorities. PaB basically guarantees you that within a specific period you get the parts, but only from a limited selection. Not that it works particularly well in practice, but that's a different story. And you need to put it in perspective: We as LEGO nerds may be willing and able to put up with the usability nightmare that is BL, but many others won't. Different strokes for different people... Mylenium

Nope. And now that I see it, I think I misread your question and talking about "old wartime stories". Sorry. I'd maintain the position that these are probably specially packaged somewhere, though. Mylenium

Doesn't seem to be a factor these days. All review sets are regular sets as far as I have seen (not myself, just on other people's sets). Otherwise I would concur that they are probably specially packaged items. Someone once explained on a blog that before there was the LEGO Ambassador Network review packages were handled by conventional marketing agencies and for a long time they even had to return the sets. It would therefore make sense they'd mark them specifically so they didn't end up in shady places. Also keep in mind that this was long before they had their big packaging and logistics facilities and production wasn't as automated. So some poor soul probably had to package these by hand months before the actual production runs/ street dates. Mylenium

A lot of nostalgia, for sure, be it from real experience or just looking at a different era with rose-tinted glasses. There are a few other factors, the crudeness of the models itself being one. There's a certain appeal in simplification just like with certain art styles. The other thing is of course that it was a lot more complicated to produce this stuff back then. Discovering a new element from a new mold or even just a new print would have a completely different impact because you knew how hard it was to pull off. This also affects perception overall because the market as a whole was simply different. I remember this well from my scale modelling days at the time. There wasn't a new model coming out every day. Stuff was shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair and other such shows and that was basically it for the rest of the year. These days it's literally an endless stream of new releases which makes each individual item a lot less significant. And for LEGO it's pretty much the same. With a few hundred new sets coming out every year it's a whole different story compared to perhaps thirty to fifty sets each year way back when... Mylenium

They couldn't if they tried. It makes no sense at all from the "How to run a big company." POV. They'd lose insane amounts of money. Mylenium

Why not simply post a photo instead of dancing around the issue? I mean it's literally 7th grade basic physics knowledge to figure out how much force a lever needs to pivot around a point when there is a known counter force and all parameters are known or measurable. Mylenium

Tiles on the side. Mylenium

I'm with @MAB on this one. If you want to ruin your day by feeling offended then so be it, but otherwise there's no substance to it, not legally, not in the abstract sense of what constitutes art and interpretation. I'm not saying that it doesn't suck, but it's really pointless to even waste a second thought on it. If you were to apply this attitude, professional product designers could be upset all day for finding Chinese rip-offs of their work in dollar stores. It just happens all the time these days. And if you want to open that can of worms: When it comes to copyright issues, there is rarely ever any discussion about "acceptable". It's all handled in absolutes and you would have to prove every tiny bit of it. It's pretty much binary. Either you have infringed or you haven't. Pretty much irrelevant. Those rules don't even apply universally inside the US, much less outside of it. There is no such thing in the EU and our Finnish friend would have a hard time falling back on this. That's why the situation is so complicated. It all hinges on how much of a "Live and let live" approach everyone has based on the individual laws and regulations regarding art and its interpretation, freedom of speech and expression and EU copyright and trademark laws. Mylenium

Anything that has its own number is a separate element, not a mold variant. Deprecated element variants that are superseded by newer ones are listed as alternatives in the little box under the image of a part. BL may be confusing at times, but that part is actually pretty straightforward. Mylenium

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=20952#T=S&C=5&O={"color":5,"iconly":0} Mylenium

Probably not as rare as one would think. I had two such occurrences in the last two years plus very recently one where a mangled part found its way into the package. It wasn't anything important and I could fix it by resorting to my own parts, but it would have been annoying contacting LEGO support again, especially since they've become very unfriendly lately about replacing parts. With that in mind it becomes a mere function of statistics. If I can be hit by such mishaps in relatively short succession then there are many more out there. This also gets further confirmed by many reviews (on reputable German and English sites) I read this year also mentioning missing or wrong parts. If I remember correctly, one of them was in one of the Sonic sets missing a whole half of the "ball" and also getting a weird Technic part instead of it and the other was some plates in the UCS Razor Crest gone AWOL or being wrong. I'm sure if I were to re-read all the articles I would find even more. Therefore, while it may not be an overwhelming number of packing errors/ missing parts/ damaged parts, it is at least significant even when set against the millions of parts and tens of thousands of sets produced every day. I'm not going to argue that there would be a way to avoid this completely, but based on how LEGO explain their own handling of these things it should be nearly impossible and that's the part that kind of puzzles me. A piece that isn't even in the set inventory should not randomly appear in a box. Mylenium

Pretty much irrelevant. The overall level of issues is the same, it's just different types of issues. Are they exaggerated? Perhaps, perhaps not. If you're unlucky you can indeed end up with a set full of problematic pieces with ugly injection points, misaligned prints with not enough opacity, poorly printed instructions, messy parts colors and clutch power deficiencies, but the same set from a different production batch could not expose a single one of those same problems. And ultimately that in and of itself is the largest issue here: The inconsistency. LEGO really need to work on that. That famous "Forrest Gump" quote applies: It's like a box of chocolates and you never know what you get. Mylenium

Yeah, LEGO's awful in-store design biting them in their butts. Stealing is probably not an issue, but the models clearly suffer after a week of being poked by everyone. A lot of them aren't even under glass and just stand openly on those cube pedestals with an employee doing guard duty. I remember the Eiffel Tower looking pretty wrecked here in our store after a while... Mylenium

They have their rules and elements that are invisible are basically a matter of "Be glad it isn't Coral!". They'll use whatever they think is good. I do get their point of making things more accessible and easier for occasional or new users, but yes, it often feels unnecessary. Mylenium Not really. Even in the same year the colors vary heavily. You can literally see how different instructions are printed at different times on different machines/ at different facilities. In fact even the PDFs often already show this, suggesting that their color management is all over the place or non-existent. Mylenium

Well, one could only hope that they keep separate databases for the actual catalog vs. the sales stuff. Otherwise BL is a typical case of the horse having gotten too big to ride and also gotten old... Mylenium

Unlikely that you'll be able to pull it off. To my knowledge e.g. the Scala/ Belville Pink isn't in a single 1 x 1 element, only 1 x 2 plates and a few others. I'm pretty sure that would apply to most other colors as well. You'll be lucky to even get any element in a given color if only it is rare enough. After all, some colors have been used in one or two sets only way back when... Mylenium

It's cheaper, plain and simple. Mylenium

Mega (Construx) has a 1 x 1 version of this. No idea in which sets you'd find a DBG version, though. I only know it in Gold from som Destiny/ Halo sets. Mylenium

Holy smokes! TL;DR! I'm out of here. Mylenium

Oh please, don't spout LEGO's self-motivated propaganda for the umpteenth time. It's in their interest to tell people molds are expensive to justify their prices, but the reality is just the opposite. Molds have never been as expensive as the moon and at the current point have never been cheaper thanks to CNC milling, electric erosion, inductive partial tempering, laser stuff and so on. Yes, a "block" (all the connections and ancillary that holds the actual mold and the mold combined) costs a given amount X, but when small 100 people facilities producing in the B2B sector can afford having custom molds made, then so can LEGO. And given their revenue, they can do so more than once a year. For aforementioned reasons your argument also fails on the precision point, BTW. Nobody intentionally degrades quality in the hopes of producing cheaper molds. That's just not how this works... Mylenium

There's sensible profit margins and then there's 20 Euro Beatboxes. LEGO killed it right out of the gate by even trying to sell these products at such abhorrent prices. Sure, everything a company like LEGO does is to generate some form of benefit (not always monetary), but it's not like we're talking luxury products you can sell at totally arbitrary prices. They simply overstepped the line with VIDIYO and got slapped hard for it. Mylenium

As safe as anything hosted on a private domain that barely seems to scrape by... And it's clearly not helping that there's a new one opening every few months.. Mylenium