I mean I'm really not sure why you'd want the slavishly media-accurate toy (well as slavishly media-accurate as a mass release toy can be) in the slavishly media-accurate line to do the thing that didn't happen in the media the toy is based on but that's just me.
Because Newage showed us that having the inner robot is not an obstacle to achieving a slavishly cartoon accurate robot mode. We can have it all. I had hopes that a Commander would try.
Small semantic bit here. I think "why you would expect" is more apt for this than "why you would WANT". It makes sense to want an extra feature (more than it does to expect them to break the pattern).
But the thing is, this extra feature would not PRECLUDE a "slavishly media accurate" altmode and robot mode, in a line that doesn't always have "slavishly media accurate" transformation schemes anyway. If slavishly media accurate is all that important to a person or to Hasbro themselves as part of this line's apparent identity, they can absolutely still have that.
They've done 2-3 Commanders now that had a base robot mode with a trailer that did Other Stuff. And two of them had trailers whose Other Stuff was "turn into part of a bigger robot", whether it's Armada Prime's lower supermode half or Motormaster's Menasor arms AND legs.
They did it at Leader class too but with a trailer that struck a (rough) design compromise between G1 and RID2001 and a robot held back by budget limits; there's more room to nail it at this price point, especially when they design it from the ground up as G1 rather than need to compromise.
It's not unreasonable to think they could have made a base robot here (maybe whose arms and legs extended a bit to accommodate the armor) with a trailer that could break up into armor pieces.
I'm with you, PrincessViola, in that it's not surprising, but it's disappointing nonetheless.
