This has been a real rollercoaster for me.
I knew from the announcement that this was an inevitable funding. It's one of the best-looking projects they've done, and really it seems to deliver on the idea of upgrading this popular design set. That there were even people wondering what they changed (or would change) does speak to the excellence of the originals, but the opportunity to revisit these with more current engineering and materials and the less retail-affected HasLab budget is a very intriguing one. I'm very happy for everyone who's into it, and am glad it's gotten backed (again, inevitably so) and that everyone's gonna get what seems like an awesome set.
Now, there were some issues with the size of these in terms of meshing with the rest of the mainline collection, but this set seemed like one that I might eventually consider getting another way.
But what really gave me pause was that, right around the time these were announced, a preorder I had with a local specialty store for Deathsaurus came due.
And while I had financially prepared for that, the reality of dropping such a big stack of cash in one go for this huge thing packed with also-huge and (honestly) what felt like superfluous stuff was a pretty sobering moment. Not that there's any issue with the quality of that OR this current offering. Just a stark reminder of my current ability to play in that realm of "costs this much" and "is this size"/"takes up this much space". Especially for a character like Deathsaurus that I didn't really have that kind of attachment to (less than the RID2001s, for sure) but that I'd talked myself into getting since I'd gotten the Victory Saber set. (Which, oddly, I didn't feel that kind/degree of sorta-buyers remorse after getting, despite me being as not-attached to them as Deathsaurus?)
(Also oddly, I haven't been able to talk myself into selling Deathsaurus either.)
The RID2001 period was a great time for me as an online Transformers fan. The air crackled with possibility, with the Beast era engineering being applied to vehicles and the Japanese media being adapted to the US, and with so much feeling invigoratingly new for the brand. I have so much love for RID2001 as a brand period (a shade more than the fiction, although that kind of fresh sandbox was also lots of fun.) And so these designs will always be enticing, and tbh if much simpler retail-compliant versions had been available I'd probably have jumped at them. But I'm having to sit this one out, and while I'm SURE I'll be consumed by the FOMO once they see release, I'm feeling better about that more and more right now.