I really hope they won't "G1-ify" Animated characters. Most of the point of the Animated characters is them looking like their animated selves. I don't see the point of doing them at all if their designs don't stay true to the series. If Animated Cyclonus is G1-ified... then he's just Kingdom Cyclonus. Bumblebee movie Optimus would just be G1 Optimus without his Bumblebee movie style. I don't see why EVERYTHING needs to look like G1 anyway.
It's funny you mention all that. One of the proposals Fun Pub conceptualized for BotCon but ultimately did not carry out was "Transformers Unanimated", in which they used various CHUG molds to create de-Animated versions of Animated characters. Like, Optimus from Universe Inferno, Headmaster-controlled Starscream from Thrilling 30 Brainstorm, Sentinel Prime from Thrilling 30 Trailcutter, Wreck-Gar from Prime Breakdown, etc. The idea was ultimately turned down because, as creative as some of these mold suggestions were, it was realized that (just as you said) if you take the "Animated" out of Animated, you're just left with G1 (or whatever else was being homaged), regardless of any differences in altmode or deco.
I think the whole point of the Legacy line is that it's supposed to bring in characters from all different aspects of the franchise, but in a unified design aesthetic. Basically, it wouldn't be a toy of Animated Lugnut, it's a toy of a Lugnut from a G1-adjacent universe that's inspired by the original Animated Lugnut.
Yet, Hasbro keeps advertising all the non-G1 toy characters as dimension-hoppers originating from alternate universes and not native to G1, who have crossed over into "the G1 universe" via portals.
To that point, you're absolutely right when you say there's no reason to do a Legacy Animated Cyclonus, since it literally is just regular Cyclonus. But there ARE a lot of Animated only characters such as Lugnut, Prowl, Oil Slick, garbage-truck Wreck Gar, etc. that would be interesting to see homaged in a new setting.
Heh, what's funny about that is, at one of the last few BotCons, when I got to talk to Derrick Wyatt, I told him how some of those Animated-original character designs you mentioned were my favorite designs of the series; the ones that tried to do new things instead of just taking preexisting designs of characters from other series and just putting an Animated filter over them. But when I mentioned Prowl as being one of those original designs, he stopped me and insisted that Prowl is an Animated design of G1 Prowl. I told him that Prowl had been made different enough to be considered a new design, but he stubbornly refused to consider that the case. To him, Animated Prowl is G1 Prowl "Animated-ized", which is ludicrous. Prowl may have started out that way in the conceptual stages, but the end result is barely similar at all to G1 Prowl.
As for the Beast Wars figures and why they're not G1'd, I'd say that just because, like is fairly common these days, those are spiritually Kingdom toys that didn't get made during that line, but are instead bleeding over into the next.
It's also likely that the BW figures aren't G1-ified because, decades ago, we got a full cartoon that fully showed that the BW characters and their curvy designs (which are just as curvy as the TF: Prime designs, if not more curvy) are truly native to the the same world as the G1 characters and their boxy designs.
And therein likely lies the real reason that the Beast Wars figures are so faithfully curvy while the Prime figures have been boxified. The current Hasbro team apparently just cannot fathom the idea of Transformers that look like
this coexisting the same world as Transformers who look like
this, when they evidently have no problem with fathoming the idea of Transformers who look like
this inhabiting the same world as those who look like
this, all because of two cartoons that already
established it as such a long time ago, despite the fact that
these and
these have
significantly different aesthetics from each other, while
these even look a LOT more like they could be related to
these than to
these.
The fact that the Beast Wars characters do exist in the same world as the G1 characters, despite having so different an aesthetic of their own, ought to be enough reason to let the Prime characters keep their aesthetic intact. After all, comics seem to have no trouble depicting characters from all across the multiverse coexisting in the same universes, in which their unique design aesthetics are all kept intact, whether it's instances of literal dimension-hopping (like in
Fun Pub's TransTech stories) or cases where original characters from one continuity are transplanted wholecloth into another (like in
IDW's 2005-2018 comics).
