Aanchir

Agreed! Ideally, I'd love if any future curved road plate came in a smaller angle like 22.5°, 30°, or 45° rather than a fixed right angle, since that would allow for more varied layouts, sort of like with curved LEGO train tracks. But on the other hand, those sorts of angles can be trickier to build with. Frankly, curved road baseplates have always been sort of frustrating to use, from my experience. It's always a challenge to create tiled sidewalks that match the road's inside or outside radius, plus it's tricky to make efficient use of the studded area around the outside of the curve since most buildings have a rectangular footprint. And comments from other AFOLs also tend to give me the impression that the curved road baseplates are considered less useful than the other three shapes. As such, if LEGO decides to include curves in this new system, it could be an opportunity to find some way of making them more useful or versatile than they have been in the past.

60304! The 1x2 plates used as the bulbs on the streetlamps (which have usually been Transparent Yellow in previous sets) are Glow White instead. I don't think a whole lot of AFOLs tend to use tile-based roads at all, because of the seams you mention. Those who do choose to go "fully custom" tend to opt for sideways stacks of bricks and plates, since the seams between those parts are subtler (although roads built this way end up thicker and more parts-intensive than most alternatives). But I think this "middle ground" between fully custom roads and prefabricated baseplates will end up benefiting not only AFOLs, but also kids. Roads like this offer a lot of "mix-and-match" potential, especially since they can easily link up with the buildings and scenery in other modern sets. They also make it easy to build ramps and other features that can make playtime more exciting than a completely flat road layout. The main thing it's missing at this point is a curved road, but it would be very easy to expand it to include one. I feel like 4-wide cars still have their uses, particularly for smaller vehicle classes. Maybe it's a little old-fashioned of me, but I feel like in the City theme, 6-wide vehicles are more suited to uses like large family cars, full-size cars, SUVs, and many types of truck/lorry. For example, I would generally opt for 6 studs wide (7 if you count wheel arches) for City-scaled equivalents of cars like the Ford Expedition, Dodge Charger, or Chevrolet Impala. But for cars like a Mini Cooper, Smart Fortwo, Citroën 2CV, or Fiat 500, I'd probably stick with a 4 stud wide chassis. Obviously, other themes like Speed Champions and Creator 3-in-1 often tend towards more realistically proportioned cars (often 8 studs wide or wider), while more fantasy-heavy themes like Ninjago, Agents, and Super Heroes tend to exaggerate vehicle sizes much further so there is room for more detail and play features. But contrary to a lot of worries I remember seeing many years ago about the scale of LEGO vehicles expanding out of control, I feel like the range of vehicle sizes within the City theme itself has remained remarkably stable.

It seems to vary from vehicle to vehicle, like it did this year. The main vehicles in 60276, 60282, and 60283 all have doors, as does the compact car in 60292. I'm often pretty indifferent to whether a set has baseplates or not, but I definitely think it'll be cool to see roads appearing in more sets rather than only available separately. And honestly, I think it'll be much easier for LEGO to put these new road plates in sets than it was even with the traditional road plates, since these parts can fit inside smaller boxes. The modular design also introduces the possibility of sets including unique custom-built road segments that can be linked together with the standard ones… for example, I could imagine a future construction set using a standard 8x16 plate plus various tiles, slopes, and/or wedge plates to represent a damaged segment of road (e.g. a pothole or sinkhole). Oh, by the way, something I didn't mention that I really love… the new intersection set using glow-in-the-dark plates and printed tiles to construct "working" solar-powered streetlamps!!! It's so brilliant and I can't believe that possibility had never occurred to me!

Honestly, by City standards the Family House is pretty excellent, IMO. It certainly has a much more detailed and livable-looking interior than 8403 did 10 years ago. If anything, I feel like it might benefit from some kind of awning over the electric charging station to help break up the "smoothness" of the left side. I love the Ninjago video game one of the children is playing in one of the alternate images! I love that sort of cross-theme reference. Friends houses definitely tend to be way more detailed inside and out, and IMO their color schemes are pretty fantastic most of the time as well. But given how long it's been since the City theme had ANY residential houses/apartments, I'm pretty pleased with what this one has to offer, and hope it does well enough to ensure we get more sets along those lines in the future. And I'm willing to be patient with the occasional shortcomings in the meantime. I like the City Center set as well, although that compact car seems really awful to me compared to the much better examples we've seen in sets like 3177 and 7939 which used shorter windscreens. The combination pizzeria/martial arts dojo is definitely that set's "star attraction" for me, though the recycling truck is not bad either (love the use of that new curved element from this year's Ninjago sets as its grille)! The car wash is pretty plain, but that fits with most of the car washes I'm used to seeing in real life. The skate park is EXTREMELY appealing, and between the stunt wheelchair in that set and the seeing-eye dog in the City Center set, LEGO is clearly doing a much better job with representation than they were just a few years ago. The Vita Rush truck and cans in this set are a nice fit also, given that Vita Rush is presumably meant to be a sports drink like Gatorade or Powerade. I've already made my excitement about the new road system known, since it's the sort of thing I've been hoping to see for nearly a decade at this point. And these pictures definitely fulfill the hopes I had after seeing the previous leaked images, in that the textures of the final parts have been smoothed out considerably compared to the prototype versions. I'm a little surprised that there's a studless version of the existing 4x8 curved slope with 1x4 plate extension, but it makes a lot of sense for stuff like skateboards and wheelchairs that would struggle more on a studded surface than larger wheels and tires.

Another option if you want your sliding doors to be even thinner is to use 57895 WITHOUT a frame, and use 4510 in place of 30586. This is the technique used for the sliding rice-paper doors in Temple of Airjitzu, Ninjago City, and Ninjago City Docks. Lately I've been experimenting with the possibility of using this technique to build sliding doors for subway cars.

But were the builds of any of those sets really "compromised" for the story elements? After all, none of those features really eat up much of either set's piece count or floor space, nor do any of them really negatively impact either set's interior or exterior appearance (in fact, they often involve adding points of visual interest which other Modular Buildings lack, such as the ivy-covered grate and raised alleyway in the Detective's Office set, or the open mouth of the chimney in the Brick Bank set). So how much would either of those sets really stand to gain by omitting those play features?

Yeah, for me, aesthetic considerations about new vs. old transparent parts are far outweighed by how liberating it feels to be able to stick pretty much any two parts together without having to fear that they'd be difficult to separate later on. This used to be an immensely frustrating issue even with non-transparent parts, since for several years polycarbonate was the go-to material for parts that needed more strength than ABS (regardless of their color) like 4081, 30374, and 48729. We've already seen set designers taking advantage of these new possibilities in a few instances — particularly in the Ninjago Prime Empire sets, many of which contain transparent "health meters" which are attached to the minifigures by transparent lightsaber blades. In another very overt example, next year's set 80106 Story of Nian features fireworks built from transparent snowflakes, cones, round plates with hollow studs, and magic wands, all stuck together without any solid-colored parts in between. This would have been an illegal connection back when all of these parts were molded in polycarbonate. Perhaps most interestingly, while I don't have enough materials knowledge to verify it for certain, there's a chance this new material might finally make transparent minifigures a viable possibility. That has been a major desire among many AFOLs for over a decade for applications like ghosts or holograms, but was not possible in previous years due to the tendency of polycarbonate parts to bind together when used for high-friction connections. Interestingly, some clone brands, counterfeiters, and third-party customizers like Arealight have already used acrylic-based plastics for transparent parts, allowing them to bypass this limitation. I understand that some AFOLs are concerned about transparent parts being slightly foggier, but from what I've seen of the new material, the change in transparency is barely noticeable on thin parts like windows, windscreens, and panels, especially in colors other than standard Transparent (Trans-Clear). It certainly doesn't create discoloration as noticeable as tinted or UV-treated glass like you'd see on many real-world buildings or vehicles. All in all, the color quality and transparency would have to diminish a lot more for me to see them as defective.

Part of why I don't feel this same way is that Jamie's buildings have varied a LOT in their level of detail over the years. I feel like there's a world of difference between a set like Parisian Restaurant (with full, detailed furnishing replete with story-starters, an exterior that's highly detailed from all sides, creative use of SNOT techniques for its decorative molding, a unique hinged roof construction, etc) and his earlier sets like Cafe Corner and Green Grocer (with sparse furnishings, utterly plain rear walls, front walls and columns dominated by repetitive striped patterns, and much more basic roof designs). So with that in mind, I think the latest few buildings can easily fit comfortably within that pack. Specifically, if we compare the Bookshop to the most similar set Jamie worked on (the Pet Shop), I think it holds up remarkably well. The townhouse next to the Pet Shop had far fewer furnishings than the one next to the Bookshop. The bay windows, shop windows, stone archway, chimneys, fireplace, cornices, dormers, roofs, stairs, and furniture in the Bookshop set are also much more detailed than their equivalents in the Pet Shop set. The "plainest"/least detailed part of the Bookshop set is its rear wall, but as I mentioned, this is a weakness it shares with several of Jamie's buildings. Mind you, I can understand having a preference for the more muted colors of many of Jamie's buildings! But as far as its level of detail is concerned, I think Wes managed to meet or exceed the standards which Jamie had previously set for this type of model. Similarly, in the case of Corner Garage, a lot of elements compare favorably to the Fire Brigade, which was Jamie's only Modular Building set to include a vehicle and a garage. Fire Brigade does have some strengths that Corner Garage lacks, such as its impeccably textured brick walls. But I think Corner Garage surpasses it in other areas like its window and garage door construction, the design of its furniture and appliances, and its unsurpassed use of angled interior and exterior walls to create a more unique and detailed floor plan. That's without even touching on other elements of Corner Garage's design that set it apart, such as the gas station driveway and canopy construction, the SNOT-based bay window construction, and the veterinary clinic. So while I wouldn't say that Corner Garage surpasses Jamie's work by any means, I definitely feel like it measures up to a lot of his modular building sets, especially those which it shares the most features in common with. Marcos is another great call! I feel like a lot of the greatest strengths of his work have been how well he recreates specific non-LEGO subject matter, but that could be because licensed sets are most of what he's been assigned to work on during his career at LEGO. There's no doubt he has attained a vast repertoire of building techniques and a lot of architectural know-how over that time. As such, if he were to design a future modular building, it would be maybe our first major opportunity to see him leveraging those skills and knowledge in the context of a wholly original building design. That's definitely an exciting prospect to think about! It's also a good reminder that we can't just judge designers based on what we've seen from them in the past.While some designers like Wes Talbott had many opportunities to show us their knack for architectural and decorative building before being assigned their first modular building, others like Mike Psiaki and Torben Skov have had far more limited opportunities to show off that aspect of their creativity within their usual themes. Perhaps the next great Modular Building could be from a designer who none of us are expecting!

Honestly, I think trying to categorize the modular buildings as "European style" or "American style" tends to be a bit reductive. After all, of the sets you list as "some of the great ones", Pet Shop includes a building modeled on a New York City brownstone, and Green Grocer was inspired by buildings in San Francisco. And considering how common European architectural styles were in many United States cities even back in the early 20th century, I feel like there are only a few sets (namely Fire Brigade, Palace Cinema, and Downtown Diner) that are unambiguously "American" in appearance. Case in point: Brick Bank is in the Palazzo style, which was popular in England, Scotland, and Australia as well as the United States. Just a couple of British bank buildings in this style are 30 St. Vincent Place and 2 St. Vincent Place in Glasgow. For that matter, the style of the neighboring building more closely resembles the look of a British launderette than an American laundromat. Personally, I'm not too picky about who designs the next modular building. That said, I think one of the specific reasons Jamie stepped away from designing the modular buildings himself was that he'd done so many modular building designs and wanted to let other designers who could approach the series with a fresh perspective leave their mark on the series. While I'm sure he'll always be willing to help his colleagues with particular design challenges if the need arises, I don't see much chance of him "taking back the reins" on a future modular building outside of some special or extraordinary circumstances. And I'm fine with that! Our nostalgia certainly might make us think that Jamie's buildings had some unmatched mastery of detail, but I don't feel like the last three years' modular building sets are really any less detailed than a lot of the buildings he worked on. For my part, I would not mind seeing Wes Talbott create another modular building in the future. Besides what an amazing job he did on the Bookshop, his work on other themes like LEGO Friends, Elves, and Harry Potter also does a lot to demonstrate his eye for detail, his creative taste in colors and building techniques, and his versatility in working with different subject matter. Joel Baker, another designer hired just a few years ago, has strong credentials from working on several of those same themes — to say nothing of his incredible portfolio of MOCs that helped to get him hired for a design position at LEGO! There are also several designers like who've worked on Ninjago, Monkie Kid, and Chinese Festival sets who might be able to apply some of that same ingenuity to a modular building: for example, Michael Svane Knap, Woon Tze Chee, Markus Rollbühler, Nick Vas, Justin Ramsden, etc. All in all, a lot of exciting possibilities to consider!

Oh yeah, it'd definitely never be a viable option for entire sets. But LEGO's definitely been paying very close attention to developments in that sort of technology, and I suspect LEGO could one day find some sort of consumer-targeted application for it. Like how they have been testing a "Minifigure Factory" kiosk at the LEGO House and certain LEGO stores which uses a UV printer to apply custom graphics to minifig torsos on demand. Obviously, 3D printer technology's still a long way from being ready for any sort of service like that, but who knows what the future might hold?

Yep! Also, the townhouses in the Pet Shop and Bookshop sets use that "extra" height on the lower level for a crawl space — so all the rooms are close to the same height, but the "ground floor" room is elevated a few bricks above the sidewalk. I don't know if I'd make a prediction as far-reaching as that, but I feel like in general, LEGO only tends to focus entire modular buildings on a single property when it's a property that really REQUIRES all that space to feel authentic. In other words, if we ever got a modular school, police station, hospital, embassy, opera house/concert hall, full-service hotel, museum, or factory, I could easily see it taking up the set's entire structure. There's lots of stuff to fill those sorts of properties with that would be relevant to that main purpose even without a whole lot of repetition. In fact, just as was the case with Palace Cinema, these sorts of buildings' real-life equivalents would often require a much, much larger property than a modular building counterpart! But stuff like eateries, shops, art galleries/studios, apartments, post offices, pharmacies, etc. would probably end up sharing the same lot as other properties, just like they often do in real cities. After all, even most of the "classic" modular buildings encompassed multiple properties. Café Corner included a café on the ground floor and a hotel on the upper floors. Market Street had a bakery on the ground floor, presumably an apartment on the upper floors, and an open-air market in the neighboring lot. Green Grocer had a grocery store on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors. So even for their time, sets with a singular focus like Fire Brigade and Grand Emporium were not really the norm.

Exactly! What separates outright counterfeiters from legitimate LEGO-compatible buildng toy brands like Mega Construx, Cobi, etc, is that counterfeiters copy actual builds and graphic designs, copyright-protected characters, trademarked brands, and/or parts with patents that haven't yet expired (for example, "Spinjitzu Slam" and "Airjitzu" launchers, the roller coaster system, LEGO Juniors interlocking base plates, "super jumpers", stud shooters, the character and creature building system, the updated Technic gear shift elements, etc.) And this is what makes counterfeiting especially galling for me — the fact that if these companies weren't so committed to cutting corners by ripping off other people's designs, they COULD potentially establish themselves as legitimate competitors in the construction toys market and create products with actual originality. One company that used to make actual counterfeit products, Enlighten Bricks, has at least started to move in a more legitimate direction by coming up with their own builds and IPs (though some of the parts they use may or may not hold up to a legal challenge). But instead, most counterfeiters have seemingly decided that it's more profitable to just copy other people's hard work without paying for it than to actually hire more designers of their own.

Downtown Diner is tied with Brick Bank — you might have to scroll to the right to see some of the buildings since I listed five buildings per row on the first page. And it's only one plate shorter than the roof line of Pet Shop It's also worth noting that I was measuring to the main roof line of each building, so that excludes roof features like Downtown Diner's "dome", Fire Brigade's bell tower, Town Hall's bell tower, etc. The only reason I counted Ninjago City's central tower is that it is split into separate modules the same way as the other stories. There might also be typos or calculation errors in some places — I'm not perfect! But I hope it's useful to people anyhow. I usually make this stuff for my own reference (or sometimes just to satisfy my own curiosity about how different sets compare) but I figure if I'm gonna put in the time to make charts like this, I might as well try and make them available to other people!

There's a lot of comments I want to make here but I'm gonna try and break it down into a bulleted list so it doesn't drag on: While knock-offs do sometimes include products that TLG does not produce, they are rarely the core of those companies' business. Most of the time, a lot of the products these companies produce are copies of sets and figures from popular LEGO themes. Also, companies that really cared about delivering the sorts of products you mention that LEGO doesn't manufacture could easily do so WITHOUT infringing on anybody else's patents or trademarks. After all, many brands like Mega Bloks/ Mega Construx, Best-Lock, K'nex, Sluban, and Cobi seem to manage this. So "filling a gap" doesn't really validate any of the crooked business practices that set shadier knock-off brands apart from legitimate building toy companies. "The equivalent of a print on demand service for parts" would unfortunately not be economical for LEGO, nor even for their most unscrupulous competitors! After all, the only reason injection-molded plastic parts are affordable in the first place is economies of scale. In LEGO's case, they typically produces hundreds of thousands of any particular element that they need. So each individual copy of the element in question only has to cover a tiny fraction expenses like changing out the molds in each molding machine, cleaning out leftover plastic or dye between batches, adjusting the molding temperature for the material being used, etc. Whereas if LEGO had to produce an "on-demand" batch of just 100 of a particular element, then all of those costs would get passed onto that one buyer. It's possible that in the future this sort of thing might be possible via 3D printing, which doesn't tend to entail nearly such high overhead costs and can be automated on more of an order-per-order basis. But currently that sort of service can't achieve the precise results that LEGO expects for their products, and it will probably never match the sheer efficiency that keeps mass-produced, injection-molded components so much more affordable. Even if LEGO did fill all of these gaps in what they offer, it would not stop other companies from producing these sort of knock-offs. Because the cost of copying/reverse engineering a product somebody else already came up with will ALWAYS be less expensive than what it cost them to come up with that design in the first place. And most of the business model of counterfeit products is driven by how affordable they are, not on whether or not a legitimate equivalent exists. This is another option for on-demand ordering, but that's pretty much what LEGO already tries to offer in the form of Pick-A-Brick (both the online and in-store versions). I recognize the selection of parts available from Pick-A-Brick is inadequate for many of our needs. But usually when LEGO has tried adding more specific parts to Pick-A-Brick, very few people actually ended up buying them. So without some kind of clairvoyance (or at least, some kind of extraordinarily good predictive algorithm) to anticipate exactly how much of each part there will be demand for, this sort of preemptive approach will never be able to satisfy all of our particular demands.

I've done my best to keep track of that sort of info right here! But @tafkatb's earlier is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Lovely job! If I had any complaint, it'd be that the transition between some of the colors can be a bit abrupt compared to the smoother transition from Bright Red to Bright Orange to Bright Yellow to Bright Yellowish Green. But I understand that's probably an unavoidable consequence of which colors the wedge plates you needed were available in. You did an amazing job reinforcing the structure also! It really feels like the level of quality I'd expect from a set, not just from a MOC! The hanging/carrying handle is a particularly delightful feature, and seeing your photos, I can't help but think how awesome it'd be to hang it from some kind of mechanism that would allow it to slowly ascend and descend!

While this isn't related to any actual products, I was quite charmed to see a rainbow-colored lineup of Classic Space astronauts in the front row of the astronaut wedding in LEGO's new holiday ad: I suspect it might still be some time before purple and/or brown Classic Space minifigures exist in real life, but I'm sure they'd be quite popular choices for both Classic Space MOCs and Pride vignettes! In any case, LEGO's continued use of the redesigned helmet mold definitely seems to bode well for the likelihood of more recolors like this going forward…

Yep, that's the one. It's not super obvious since there was no brick lettering, printing, or interior furnishing to indicate what sort of business the blue house contained, but it had a sign with a croissant on it, and I'd prefer to believe that was intended as a bakery than as a second cafe released immediately after the first!

I mean, there's already been two cafés, two townhouses, two bakeries, two restaurants, and several apartments, so it's not as though having multiple properties in the same general category would be a radical departure from tradition. Plus, they could always make a future hotel on the modular street a very different TYPE of hotel than the one in the Café Corner set. That one always struck me as a small, no-frills hotel, judging not only by the small size and slightly tacky neon sign, but also the way it was relegated to the upstairs property of a cafe which was that particular street corner's main attraction. As such, new modular hotel could easily stand out from existing sets by opting for more upscale design features like those featured in Heartlake Grand Hotel: a highly decorative architectural style like Neo-Renaissance or Art Nouveau, amenities like on-site laundry and dining, elevators instead of stairs (since the last elevator in the modular buildings was eight years ago, and designers could probably come up with a much nicer design today), and maybe even a swimming pool or spa. Minifigures could include a housekeeper, a bellhop, a front desk clerk, and two or three guests.

They mention on the FAQ page that they chose to focus exclusively on the City theme for the pilot project because it offers a wide variety of minifigs, buildings, and vehicles. Its reliable popularity among both adults and kids probably also makes it a useful reference point for figuring out how to make this service appeal to both of those age groups. Presumably, if this proves successful, then LEGO will explore the possibility of similar custom set offers in other themes as well as in other countries. But keeping the focus narrow in the very beginning will probably help them pinpoint opportunities to improve on the user interface, supply chain, etc, without introducing too many confounding variables that could make the sales data or user feedback more difficult to interpret.

Maybe! Although I wouldn't expect them to be from any waves later than the second half of 2021. And it's also totally possible that both of those builds and the birthday party might've been designed specifically for this set, since they are smaller than they would typically be in a dedicated fire or police station set, and don't seem to require any exclusive elements besides a sticker sheet.

I was just looking into this new "design your own City set" thing a bit more and I found this Hoth Bricks article which helps clear up what building and vehicle options are available (beyond what can be seen on the parts of the site visible outside of Denmark). So far, there are nine vehicle options: The armored bank truck from 60198 Cargo Train The armored police truck from 60140 Bulldozer Break-In The pickup truck from 60148 ATV Race Team The helicopter from 60183 Heavy Cargo Transport The police motorcycle from 60141 Police Station The crane, ice cream trike, and sports car from 60200 Capital City The fire off-road vehicle from 60215 Fire Station (but without the "light and sound" brick from the original set) And six building options: The bank from 60140 Bulldozer Break-In The bus station from 60200 Capital City The security gate from 60169 Cargo Terminal A brand-new fire station design A brand-new police station design A brand-new birthday party design Honestly, the three new building options surprised me. I would've expected all of the building designs to be pulled from other sets like the ones we saw in the promotional images. It also surprises to me that you aren't locked to a specific number of vehicles, buildings, figures, and animals — instead it's got some sort of values assigned to them internally so that you can choose to have more vehicles in exchange for fewer buildings, more minifigs in exchange for fewer vehicles, etc. The example of a set they designed seems quite a bit larger than the ones in the promotional images, as well — with five minifigs, two buildings, and four vehicles. It'd be interesting to see an analysis of just how varied the range of options is and which options fill up the status bar most/least quickly.

Sort of a side note, but has anybody else felt a bit weird about how widely the term "facade" gets thrown around to describe LEGO buildings these days? Don't get me wrong, it's a totally appropriate term for describing structures that are extremely narrow, like the ones in Airjitzu Battle Grounds, Cloud Cuckoo Palace, Harley Quinn Cannonball Attack, or Police Dog Unit . What makes them "facades" is not just the open back, but the lack of pretty much any useful interior space. They function not as settings in their own right, but as props or backdrops to define a larger scene outside themselves. But lately it feels like I've been increasingly seeing people referring to ANY open-backed/dollhouse-style buildings as "facades", even ones that are 8–12 studs deep with full ceilings and side walls (like Diagon Alley, Elf Club House, Townhouse Pet Shop & Café, etc). And I feel like using it that broadly strips the term of its usefulness in making that much more important distinction between "a building" and "a backdrop shaped like the front of a building". I realize that for adults with full "tabletowns" (especially ones intended for display in the center of the room rather than on shelves along the sides), any sort of set without a back wall might be inconvenient or frustrating. But there are a lot of reasons that a dollhouse style can be better for many sets. Most notably, it lets you view interior scenes from more or less "eye level", which is accurate to how we would typically perceive these scenes in real life, on stage, or in cinema. It's much rarer to observe any sort of interior scene from a top-down perspective outside of video games… unless you're Ceiling Cat. Also, to keep things in perspective, open-backed, dollhouse-style buildings were overwhelmingly the norm in classic themes like Town, Castle, Pirates, Space, Trains, etc. There were a few of these sets that included a hinge so that you could easily open them up for interior access from behind or close them for finished walls on all four sides, but most sets just omitted the back wall entirely and kept the depth of the buildings narrow enough to ensure builders could reach in from behind to rearrange their occupants or furnishings. Sets like the Modular Buildings were — and remain — a departure from that norm. Does anybody else feel this way?

Keep in mind that Danish LEGO prices in general tend to be some of the highest in the world. So while this might seem absurdly expensive from the perspective of those of us who are used to living in countries where LEGO is cheaper, it's not nearly as exorbitant compared to the price of other sets in Denmark. For reference, the Ski Resort set is around 90 USD in the United States and 80 EUR in Germany, but it's 749 DKK in Denmark — which is equivalent to about 120 USD or 100 EUR under current conversion rates. By comparison, 649 DKK is a more typical price in Denmark for sets that cost around 70 USD/EUR in the United States or Germany like 4 Privet Drive, Mia's House, Friendship Bus, or Heartlake City Airplane. Obviously, it's only realistic to expect SOME kind of surcharge for any "on demand" service like this, since the packing process can't be automated or done in huge batches like with more standardized products. But truthfully, this seems like a much more efficient way of handling that sort of thing compared to previous attempts at "on demand" ordering like LEGO Factory or LEGO Design by Me (which had to be sorted and packed by hand, and couldn't offer any guarantee that the models and instruction manuals people received would would meet the same quality standards as regular sets). It'll definitely be interesting to see how this program goes and whether it might pave the way for similar services like this in the future! But it's certainly far from guaranteed, which is probably why LEGO chose to roll it out on such a limited (i.e. Denmark-exclusive) basis before deciding whether it's ready for a wider release.

Well, I disagree about the Sesame Street set not being very complicated. New Elementary wrote a review of it that goes into a lot of detail about the building techniques, which include various SNOT techniques and even full stud reversals. Even before LEGO rolled out the new 18+ branding for their "adult" sets, it would have certainly gotten at least a 14+ age recommedation like the Temple of Airjitzu had, if not higher. You're right that as a show aimed primarily at toddlers and preschoolers, it's a little counter-intuitive that the first LEGO set based on that license would be an adult-targeted item like this. But I wouldn't be surprised if LEGO ended up releasing Sesame Street sets with a 4+ age rating in the future to cater the series' typical viewing audience. Conversely, this particular set is more of a nostalgia item for adults who grew up watching Sesame Street (or whose kids did). That decision was presumably driven by a combination of factors including the original LEGO Ideas project's level of complexity, the age breakdown of the project's supporters, and the nostalgic value which supporters often expressed in comments, blog posts, and social media posts about the project. If LEGO had downgraded it to a 4+ or even 6+ age range, it would have been a vast departure from the spirit of what people had supported. As for the Elf Club House, you're right that it could probably be enjoyed by kids as well as adults. But then, the Winter Village sets have always been recommended for ages 12 and up. I think by that age, most builders are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves whether they are capable enough to build sets recommended for older builders, so I don't think raising the recommended age range is too likely to dissuade many of those TFOL buyers. The designers of the Elf Tree House also appear to have continued the tradition of breaking the instructions into two booklets, so that younger builders can work on the smaller models in the first booklet while their older family members can work on the larger and more detailed ones in the second booklet. In that respect, these sets were already expected to be fun and accessible to builders younger than the age marked on the package. I suppose next year we'll be able to determine how well this decision went for them based on whether they continue to use 18+ branding on big Ideas sets or Winter Village sets. But I doubt it'll have a huge negative impact on the potential buying audience. In the very least, I can definitely see the logic in having a particular unified packaging style for "premium" products, whether or not the decision to mark them all as "18+" ends up paying off in the long term.