Finally had time to listen to the pod.
I think you're barking up the wrong megatron with gutted gimmicks. Instead of gutting gimmicks that didn't work that well, armada Megatron gutted gimmicks that worked great. That said, I think armada Megatron is still a good toy, just not the toy anyone asked for. And I really appreciated TM2 megatron being able to shed that dead weight and now it's poseable and terrorizes maximals.
And transformers toy of the year was just too easy. They really put a lot of effort into deathsaurus and I don't think we'll see a transformers toy of that level for a long time even at haslab.
The voice directing comment on transformers one has me really thinking that voice directing has been a big cause of concern with transformers movies and Netflix.