Those are all cool and stuff, but what can you do with them once you build them? The cool thing about LEGOs was that you could build what came in the box, take it apart, mix it with everything else you have and make anything from it. Now in these kits everything is some weird bizarre shape that hadn't been discovered yet or some funky color.
If I wanted them to be little model Star Wars toys, I would go out and buy actual Star Wars models.
The majority of my LEGOs are currently in airplanes or race cars of some sort, all of which I designed myself. Bet you couldn't do that with your X-Fighter LEGO set.
That's my gripe with modern LEGO. So many of the newer sets are model-specific. All these specialized parts which have specific shapes, or are painted to resemble something... It started with the lower-end ones, but now it's everywhere - the mighty Technic sets now consist of five generic parts, and a million specially-formed parts that won't fit on other vehicles. Never mind the "story-line" sets - all those Bionicles and microcars - because they now consist almost entirely of specialized parts. Even the old Star Wars sets now use special parts.
I grew up on LEGO since I was a three, and I basically spent my childhood playing with them. I have five-four crates of random bricks, neatly sorted according to colour, with a separate box for the LEGO
Technic parts. Other than that, I have one electric motor (plus battery, cables and controller), and a pack of special
Technic parts - shafts, a few special-size bricks-with-holes-for-shafts, a collection of special bevel gears, crown gears, worm gears and racks. These allowed me to build countless contraptions, cars, buildings, and the like.
The only actual sets I had were the
yellow submarine, and a freight-train with the
9V engine. I spent so many hours building new trains and surroundings for my tracks... Unfortunately, track-extensions were very expensive, and the electric motor died two-three years ago, while I was busy showing my brother how wonderful that stuff is. The submarine was also awesome - it featured hydraulic (erm, air-pressure?) actuators for the claws (pump air into the airtank, then push a switch and watch it all move!) and all sorts of gadgets and devices, while the only "non-stock" parts was the air-tank (which was, essentially, an extension of the pumps found on other Technic models) and a small decorative bit on top. The pumps, tanks and control-lines, obviously, found their way into many other contraptions over the years.
