"They're miners... in space! They mine green Energy Crystals!" That's all you need. There was a K'nex mining set about the same time. Good stuff.
Then I realized that most of the catalog was like, Lego Harry Potter. Yeah, I really am complaining about what everyone else buys. I was up to my nose in Harry Potter merch already, I owned all 7 books. I wanted more Rock Raiders and Insectoids.
Heck, my kindergarten daughter likes that formula. I'm pretty sure there is a marketable business somewhere in there, but maybe not at sufficient scale
I get why but it feels less timeless than it used to, perhaps with less emphasis on creativity-led play. But what do I know - I'm a grownup.
And their directions were always a ton better, for sets—though they used to be more like spot-the-difference puzzles than they are now, which I credit with my burying the needle on a spatial reasoning test in high school, so I’m kinda sad they lost that perhaps-accidental pedagogical value in the shift to the you-can-follow-them-in-your-sleep, modern style of directions.
But maybe the knockoff competitors aren’t as obviously-shit as they were in the earlier days?
I wanted to like the cheaper brands but none of them have the same Lego engineering quality. We dusted off some of my old lego and the bricks still fit perfectly with the new bricks 30+ years later!