Hagane87

Up until one or two years ago, yes. And even to this day nearly every clip piece since around 2009 also has a high potential to crack on its own.

They actually DID some of that stuff under the Mega Bloks label, including Gundam, One Piece, Kamen Rider, Super Sentai and Pokemon. Heck, they even made some CCBS-esque figures for Digimon and Dragonball https://www.amazon.com/Digimon-Universe-Monsters-Appmon-Figure/dp/B01N2VHQH8

I doubt that it's related to the strength of the connection. Those tumor-hands are also on Reinhardt and multiple other Marvel-mechs. Speaking of Reinhardt, there's one thing that I always found odd about his design: why are there some extra 2x4 plates under his shoulder armor? If the designer thought that this extra height was neccessary then why was this part, which was even exclusively made for him, not moulded that way in the first place? And what's even more baffling: he actually looks better WITHOUT them!

Initially, I assumed that this was so they could save a bunch of instruction steps/pages by having the same construction twice and then simply adding the thumbs on each side. However, a lot of the sets that use this design still have them built separately so who knows.

Your topic made me sign up because I have exactly the same issue. I recently talked with Lego's customer service about this because the amount of broken clips (among other things) in sets from the last ten or so years became WAY too rampant despite not really playing with them much and having them mostly on display or in storage. It turns out that this IS a common and well known problem for Lego which they're already on that has nothing really to do with faulty batches, temperature changes or simply not handling the parts properly. Apparently the issue is more of a mix of the clip's geometry and the used plastics which can't really handle the stress put onto the clip over time when connected. The nasty thing is that the cracks don't develop from one day to another but slowly start tearing the clip apart so even if it appears that you never had any cracked clips it doesn't mean that some of them aren't cracked - it just means that those hairline cracks are still small enough to not be visible and, for now, don't really make a difference in terms of clutch power. Interestingly, digging through my older sets from the 90s and early 2000s I noticed that some pieces with clips like Aquazone armors and those 2x2 flag pieces part no.2335 actually WERE made of softer plastics that prevented or at least reduced the chance of cracking to the point that even now, 20+ years later, they're stil A-okay. Another indication that it seems to be mainly plastics-related is that clips aren't the only pieces that develop those hairline cracks but also multiple other ones like 1-stud wide parts (even including stuff like part no.6005, 6091 and 92946), minifig forearms, heels and torso sides, Mixel sockets (for some reason this only seems to affect part no.14418, though ), the clips on the hinge base part no.3937 etc. do so, too. Probably the most baffling one I had was a simple 2x2 slope brick from the TLM2 spacemen set that cracked on the side. The whole issue is even finding its way onto the boxart by now and you can see that the torso of the Nya figure on the box of the Ninjago Monastery Training set 70680 has a nasty crack on its side below the arm.