[thrower123]

This argument is about a decade out of date, and I'm completely uncomprehending how someone could not come up with a way to repurpose doors and windows and wheel axles...

There was a terrible period in the late 90s/early 2000s when they did make a bunch of really chunky large pieces that were impossible to do much with. Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and designs are littered with a ridiculous number of miniscule pieces, which do little but bulk up the part count and add baroque detailing.

A terrible example of this style of design is the most recent X-Wing (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...). Clearly a model marketed at children. But the whole thing is incredibly fragile, made up of fiddly bits, with a couple spring-loaded shooter thingies tacked on to give it a modicum of play features. The entire segment aft of the cockpit is a complicated mass of technic beams and pins with a facade over the top, to make the wings fold open, except that the wings don't actually lock open. It looks really pretty, but as a Lego set, it's a big failure.