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Spoilered my answer for anyone else who wants to guess:

I actually really like that RC! It's scaled pretty well for a minifig, and the army men are a pleasant surprise. I'm noticing that the more sets I accumulate, the more I seem to appreciate small builds... 🤔

I'm pretty firmly on Team Regular Minifig Heads here. I really like the Buzz I got from the Disney CMF series a few years back, and I'm excited for the release of a Woody to match. Overall the set looks really good for a 4+, but I'll hold out for reveals of the rest of the line before I decide whether to pick it up. Most likely I'll just get the RC set, but this one's mighty tempting as a potential add-on to my Fairground Mixer.

Dang, there's a lot to catch up on since I last checked this thread, so forgive me if someone already mentioned this, but I love that the inclusion of Ant-Man in the War Machine Buster means we can do a role reversal of the "Tiny dude is big now" scene.

Doesn't make any less sense than Crusher or Destroyer or whatever else was rumored, does it?

War Machine Buster sounds perfectly fine to me if it's a Hulkbuster-style armor for War Machine.

That's weird, considering those are the exact names I found months ago, before the wonkily-translated list with "Battle of the Assembled Avengers" was making the rounds. I dunno why this person would suddenly backpedal and say they're fake, unless they were spooked about compromising their source. But like others said, no point in getting all caught up in scraps of information when official reveals aren't too far off.

I agree about the "little bit weird" observation, and in the best possible way. It's funny, every photograph I've seen of the Vibrant Coral pieces (even the official box art for the Pop-Up Party Bus) really fails to capture just how... well, vibrant they really are. This color really has to be seen in person to be truly appreciated. There are definitely some colors that fluoresce under a blacklight, and their official names reflect as much: 47 Transparent Fluorescent Reddish Orange, 143 Transparent Fluorescent Blue, and 49 Transparent Fluorescent Green.

Yup. In early 2012, I was working in retail and would occasionally scour our store's internal inventory system for updates on upcoming products, which was how I found 21014 Villa Savoye ($69.99) and 21015 Eames House ($59.99), both with a slated release date of September. I never turned up any pictures or anything, but presumably there's at least a rough draft somewhere in LEGO's archives if it got as far as a name and price being released to retailers. But then September came and went with only 21014 hitting the shelves, and 21015 was nonexistent until it resurfaced the following summer attached to the Leaning Tower of Pisa instead. Anyway, I try not to dwell on that too much - even if I naïvely hope, every year, maybe this year they'll dust off the plans for that one and put it into production - since as Tom notes it's pretty clear the Architect Series just wasn't commercially viable, especially as the theme as a whole has gotten wider mainstream distribution. Besides, it's probably a good thing for my own budget that my interest in this theme has waned in recent years, because there's no shortage of other sets catching my attention these days. I try to take the optimistic approach that while it's not a great time to be a LEGO Architecture fan, it's still a pretty great time to be a LEGO fan overall.

There have never been two Creator Expert vehicles in one year before, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

It's at least got the spiraling setbacks to lend it some variety, so it wouldn't be quite as repetitive a build as something like the Seagram Building, but I agree that in general towers are less likely candidates. Then again, I also thought that buildings that had already been done as Architecture sets were unlikely to be revisited as Creator Expert sets, then 10234 and 10253 came out, so what do I know? My dream set for this line would be something Greek - a Parthenon, or maybe even a full Acropolis if they scale it down. And wasn't there some talk a while back about a Creator Expert-level LEGO House, or was that just referring to what became 21037?

It's a toad, on a stool. It's a pun. No, really! Mark Stafford confirmed as much, but he also said he enjoys seeing others' interpretations.

All valid points as well, and I suppose the discussion over what qualifies a building as capital-A Architecture will never be any more clearly resolved than what distinguishes a book as capital-L Literature. I can certainly say one point in favor of the new ESB set is that being a similar size/piece count to last year's Statue of Liberty means it can convey the proportions and sheer height of the building much better than the previous iterations.

The Empire State Building is still undeniably way more of a tourist attraction than it is a hallmark of design. I have a degree in architecture and I couldn't even name the firm that designed it off the top of my head. (It was Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon, by the way, who are noted as "best known for designing the Empire State Building" in the first sentence of their Wikipedia article.) In my more cynical moods I'm inclined to agree with @Lucarex about just renaming the line and being done with it. I mean, I try not to be one of those cranky old why-doesn't-TLG-cater-directly-to-my-sophisticated-tastes AFOLs, but a tiny part of me will always be bitter that the planned Eames House set was scrapped in favor of a Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Keep in mind that sets displayed at these events often have preliminary/placeholder minifigs, so I'm not getting my hopes up too much for character rosters just yet.