Brikkyy13

Something I can't find: the interrogation droid. Also, the dianoga has seemingly been replaced with just the head.

I think the goal was to raise the price of 10188 and not have fans get all up in arms over it (obviously it failed). As stated before, what I think it boils down to is the fact that production costs of 10188 were getting too high and LEGO couldn't make a decent profit anymore. $400 in 2008 is approximately equal to $470 in 2016, and I think there would be significantly more backlash if they just raised the price of 10188. If they did that, people would probably get just as upset as they are now and would probably be asking "why don't we get updated figures with the price raise?"

I don't think you can call it a "lazy re-hash." As many people have pointed out, 10188 was extremely popular, as evident by being widely available for 8 years. It's logical that this update is virtually identical to the original.

Kids are going to want to buy the things they can play with, not what they can look at. As active as the AFOL community is, the target market was, is and always will be children. LEGO will always produce products for children first, adults second, and a lot of AFOLs seem to forget that.

I was just thinking this. The outer shell would be incredibly heavy in terms of LEGO even if it is just plates.

That set in the window is clearly 10188 with the superlaser dish missing the outer ring of parts

I'm not at all surprised at the fact that it's is just an update. The increase in price is pretty reasonable too, with inflation and everything LEGO was probably losing money on 10188. I'd rather them update it and include new figures than simply increase the price of the old one.

Not to rehash the debate, but HawkLord's comment about collecting transformers reminded me of something. The old Star Wars transformers toys had a few Jedi Interceptors, and the droids all stuck out like R4 in the new set. Doing some digging, I found this shot from Revenge of the Sith http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130215055242/starwars/images/a/af/ObiWanBlueEta2-ROTS.png The droid is positioned up quite high, so it would appear that TLG is actually making the model more accurate.

I have an idea as to why the droid socket is messed up. Look at the underside of the droid socket and you'll see a slideshoe. Maybe there's an ejector function? Maybe the photo just has R4-P17 positioned in a way to demonstrate the function.