I wonder if the one-shots and whatnot will go back to the IDW1 continuity or if they'll stick with IDW2 until the end. Odd that they're keeping My Little Pony, since they haven't solicited anything for that for either March or April...but then again, they're probably waiting for the new show to finally come out, I guess.
And, yeah, I'll agree, between Roberts and Barbers run at IDW and Fun Pub's run of completely crazy continuity callbacks...I'm not sure what it is that would get me really excited for the next Transformers comic. I think part of the reason I never fully embraced IDW2 was because I was still carrying a torch for IDW1.
You might be able to do something with all the Japanese G1 series. Maybe, basically having them all happen at once, so you could have subplots with Star Saber trying to find his footing on Earth, while mysterious entities are giving humans the ability to turn themselves into Transformers, and Optimus exploring the far reaches of outer space in the meantime? As much as the Japanese G1 stuff gets referenced, I don't think it's ever really been "introduced" to a large audience properly. There's a opportunity to remix some of those ideas.
It'd kind of be fun to do Beast Wars, but on a bunch of alien worlds. Mind you, the current Beast Wars book *might* have been leading up to something like this anyway, but a book that starts out with them taking new alien-looking alt-modes could be kind of fun. Maybe facing off against something like Scorponok's Machination companies on different worlds, or searching for Shockwave's ores or something?
We could do something post-Beast Machines, with everyone being techno-organic...but I feel like there's a reason we never got anything that ever really embraced that concept. Plus, we have gotten versions of the Transtech guys, and some of the convention stuff does go into post-Beast Machines territory. Still, if you could find a interesting angle to the techno-organic stuff, it'd be a new direction.
Or...um...plants? We never did get to see more Transformers like Botanica. You could do...something with that, I guess? Maybe a group of Transformers terraforming planets for a group of human allies that are following after them, following the destruction of Earth? Helping all these humans find new homes. I'd be...different, I guess.
I mean, most likely, we're probably going to get a back-to-basics war book on Earth. It's actually been a little bit since we've had that in the comics, really.