That whole line of Universe '08 was plagued by the team overthinking very simple problems. I'm not even saying they should have made everything super G1 referential. Classics '06 managed to reinvent classic designs without the figures being fiddly, weedy messes.
The insistence on forcing movie-style aesthetics and engineering into a line that should have been more simple and straightforward really undermined a lot of what they were going for.
The way I see it is that whatever line they were working on, effected the next line as well. Movie 1 stuff tended to look and feel very Cybertron; and Universe 08 ends up feeling very 'Movie' once they started to get the hang of those designs; like it was hard for the designers to switch tracks.


