I'm not sure "dumbed down" is the right phrasing, although I agree their newer style does make arm and head swaps much harder to do.
Yeah - I call it 'after Outrage' and it is really not very hobbyist appealing. GW does the same stuff lately. It's like assembling for dummies. Really cool from a brush for hire perspective tho, as id does not require so much pinning and handywork the usual stuff does. It's just that when a hobbyist and conversion enthusiast in me sees this stuff - it cries out in pain. As a sidenote - I really 'loved' the miniatures upon release of the pictures. I grew to calm down my love once I got the box and seen how the assembly works. The idea behind these minis, the end result execution - I like both, but hate the way the pieces are designed to come together. Here's a pic so guys who don;t know how does it look like can see:
Yeah, this new assembling is good for people with less time like me, but the Combined Army HVT didn't fit properly. :( So I have quite a split opinion about it.
"Soldier-proof?" XD I'd normally would say "simplified", however look at the new Garuda... some models are down to "this goes like this, period, there is no other way" (even if, as Harlequin mentions, that is not a guarantee of a tight fit), for example the Kanren hacker is broken into two pieces: leg+weapon+arm&hand (right side), and the rest of it, while on the old ways it would have been "body, head, weapon+arm+hands, and probably the other arm, for a total of 4 pieces". The step before, with the cubic slots, was a simplification (you could file away for different poses on several models, others like Achilles would require sawing), but now the process is totally restricted. Thus my choice of "dumbed down". Personally, I'd like a blister of helmets for each faction (say 12-20 helmets at the price of a blister, whatever makes more sense for a 9 bucks blister) and for the heads to be easily swappable to an extent, so we could convert some miniatures between factions if we wanted to (like I did back in the day with the Wu Ming HRL and the Chandra SpecOps' helmeted head). Sadly, if the new models all come like the Kanren hacker or the new morlocks, that will be an even more unrealistic dream.
I imagine it's a cost saving matter for them - they can make a two piece model that has as interesting/complex of a sculpt as one that would have traditionally been 3-4 pieces. Every additional piece means one more bit that they have to cast, inventory, and pack.
I also think that this design is brilliant in a way. Morlocks have metachemistry and these models have names already attached to them. It's easier to remember that Joker rolled Regeneration and Harley Move 8:4, etc than Morlock 1, Morlock 6 etc.
But the old models were pretty easy to remember, there was lion dude, lizardman, elf-fetish and ms tentacle hair
