When you claim these sorts of issues aren't "rocket science", you are essentially saying that the folks behind the D&D minis line are idiots and that you could do better.Heck, that a child could do better. And that is insulting. It's also arrogant, condescending, and flat out incorrect.
Thank you for putting a whole bunch of words in my mouth. Where I come from, saying that something "isn't rocket science" does not imply any of those things, but, hey, maybe it has a whole different meaning in your part of the world.
Could I do better? Maybe. I don't know. I haven't tried.
Are they idiots? No. The ones I met (online) are very nice, very intelligent people. The problem is that
they didn't get to decide. They have the whole blasted Hasbro/WotC bureaucracy above them, the marketing department, and a design process which is arcane and entirely too lengthy. I'm sure that Stephen Schubert and Peter Lee would have made the line 10x better if they were given enough leeway. But they weren't. They had to conform to what's marketable, what's profitable, what's coming up in an adventure or monster compendium, what's good for skirmish, what's some high-up's pet creature, which sculpt works in production, and so on. And then they had to deal with the fact the ever-growing list of "cost-cutting measures" from Hasbro.
Whose idea was it to put an uncommon stirge in a set with a distribution that makes uncommons only marginally less rare than rares? Marketing, I'm sure.
Whose idea was it to have rare (instead of uncommon) dragonborn minis? Marketing again, if you ask me.
And all these examples are extremely counter-productive. Instead of increasing miniature quality and giving people what they want, WotC marketing goes for the "gotcha" approach. Figuring that people are going to end up with a sour taste in their mouths after a bunch of "gotchas" like that, particularly when coupled with poor paint jobs and increasing prices is definitely not rocket science. But it's not the DDM team that's to blame.
