A thought also on the whole discussion about the rumors of Ravage being rebuilt, etc: wouldn't this be the Transformer equivalent of Elvis lives(apart form the fact that Ravage actually does)? Or perhaps a better example: how Kamen Riders were treated as an urban myth in Fourze. They quite clearly existed, but no one can confirm the details, so it's treated like Bigfoot and Nessie. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Ravage impersonators unofficially "encouraged" by Ravage himself to keep his little secret while still being able to do wetwork. If he gets spotted or to one of the people he deals with, he's just another impersonator. And if he does reveal himself to someone, who's gonna believe them?
And back on the whole information creep thing, it existed in the toon as well, not just IDW. Besides the Quintessons, remember that Alpha Trion was A3, but that was another fact lost over however long the timeframe was. And to use your example, if the biblical Abraham was around and people did try asking him questions, and all he could do was shrug his shoulders, people would eventually decide he's just a kooky old man, which as I recall is how Alphatrion was looked at. Just because you can ask the questions doesn't mean they can or will answer them, and may even leave more questions than answers when all is said and done. And that assumes they don't pull a Highlander or vampire and just change identities every so often, so people might know a Alpha Trion but they don't know if he's THE Alpha Trion. And he ain't talking(assuming he even knows himself at this point).
And as far as data preservation and backups etc - even the cloud is not immune to that. Backups don't get tested, data gets buried under other data, maybe some of it even gets deliberately destroyed or replaced. The cloud is just a fancy name for someone else's computer, and data there can corrupt or be lost just as easily as someone typing rm -rf / and bumping enter before they finish typing the directory path. There's plenty of stories of technicians accidentally dropping entire massive database tables by accident. Information that seemed useless now might be erased and then people want it later - see for example the lost Dr Who episodes as a real-world example, where the BBC assumed no one would be interested in it at the time and didn't take care to preserve it. Even today, examples of lost media exist, and I don't mean studios deleting completed works for tax writeoffs. Add in a worldwide war that drains the planet of energy to the point that you're basically abandoning it just to survive.... and for that matter in that sort of environment preserving technology documentation is going to have a much higher priority than the census records from the 30000th year of Nova Prime's administration. One bombing run may not take out important records, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of wars can certainly do a lot of damage to records over time. A few here and a few there still adds up.
I also don't think that you have to talk about billions of years for creative freedom. Look how fast the Transformers changed once they came in contact with humans in G1. *masters, Pretenders, etc. Look how fast humanty's own tech has changed in the past hundred years compared to the past 1000. Just because things were static for 10 million years doesn't mean they'll be static for the next 10 million, particularly if there's information loss and cataclysmic wars happening for thousands of years during that time period. (ANd you know, now I really want to see a Cybertronian archeologist equivalent, trying to piece things together in that sort of environment!) There's plenty of creative ways to get that creative freedom within merely geologic timeframes or less.
Additionally there's the audience problem. Get too large, and your audience's eyes will glaze over, or they'll just stop caring - just like how people tend to not really grasp the magnitude of difference between modern millionaires and billionaires. Just throwing larger numbers at it, once you pass a certain threshold, isn't going to help.
Again, yes, 300 is too little, but there ought to be a middle ground here to work with that's not reaching the point of galactic timescales.
And back on the whole information creep thing, it existed in the toon as well, not just IDW. Besides the Quintessons, remember that Alpha Trion was A3, but that was another fact lost over however long the timeframe was. And to use your example, if the biblical Abraham was around and people did try asking him questions, and all he could do was shrug his shoulders, people would eventually decide he's just a kooky old man, which as I recall is how Alphatrion was looked at. Just because you can ask the questions doesn't mean they can or will answer them, and may even leave more questions than answers when all is said and done. And that assumes they don't pull a Highlander or vampire and just change identities every so often, so people might know a Alpha Trion but they don't know if he's THE Alpha Trion. And he ain't talking(assuming he even knows himself at this point).
And as far as data preservation and backups etc - even the cloud is not immune to that. Backups don't get tested, data gets buried under other data, maybe some of it even gets deliberately destroyed or replaced. The cloud is just a fancy name for someone else's computer, and data there can corrupt or be lost just as easily as someone typing rm -rf / and bumping enter before they finish typing the directory path. There's plenty of stories of technicians accidentally dropping entire massive database tables by accident. Information that seemed useless now might be erased and then people want it later - see for example the lost Dr Who episodes as a real-world example, where the BBC assumed no one would be interested in it at the time and didn't take care to preserve it. Even today, examples of lost media exist, and I don't mean studios deleting completed works for tax writeoffs. Add in a worldwide war that drains the planet of energy to the point that you're basically abandoning it just to survive.... and for that matter in that sort of environment preserving technology documentation is going to have a much higher priority than the census records from the 30000th year of Nova Prime's administration. One bombing run may not take out important records, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of wars can certainly do a lot of damage to records over time. A few here and a few there still adds up.
I also don't think that you have to talk about billions of years for creative freedom. Look how fast the Transformers changed once they came in contact with humans in G1. *masters, Pretenders, etc. Look how fast humanty's own tech has changed in the past hundred years compared to the past 1000. Just because things were static for 10 million years doesn't mean they'll be static for the next 10 million, particularly if there's information loss and cataclysmic wars happening for thousands of years during that time period. (ANd you know, now I really want to see a Cybertronian archeologist equivalent, trying to piece things together in that sort of environment!) There's plenty of creative ways to get that creative freedom within merely geologic timeframes or less.
Additionally there's the audience problem. Get too large, and your audience's eyes will glaze over, or they'll just stop caring - just like how people tend to not really grasp the magnitude of difference between modern millionaires and billionaires. Just throwing larger numbers at it, once you pass a certain threshold, isn't going to help.
Again, yes, 300 is too little, but there ought to be a middle ground here to work with that's not reaching the point of galactic timescales.
