>
These days, when I browse the Lego section at any large toy store, all I see are heavily customized ("licensed") sets that seriously restrict what you can build with them. The bow of a ship is no longer a jagged stack of rectangular blocks; it's a large, smooth, custom-molded piece that can't easily fit in anything but a ship.This is another example of the rose-colored nostalgia the article mentions, I think. Lego ships have always used dedicated boat parts for the hulls, starting in 1973 with the Tugboat (http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/310_Tugboat) that kicked off the Legoland Boats line; the Pirates line that debuted in 1989 did the same, starting with the Black Seas Barracuda set (http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/6285_Black_Seas_Barracuda). It makes them much more seaworthy for bathtub play. The Legoland Boat sets used to come with a special weighted keel piece for the bottom to keep ships upright in the water; I don't know if the pirate ships do, but of course you can always re-use the ones from the boat sets.
> So maybe that's part of the reason why we think Lego is getting more expensive. There have always been small, cheap sets and large, expensive sets. But unlike in the 80's, most of the small sets are no longer worth buying. They are so heavily themed and custom molded that the average kid can't do anything truly creative with them.
This is definitely not true. I don't have the money for big shopping these days, but every time I'm at a Target I like to pick up a little $5-$10 kit, ideally one of the mini vehicles. I always get hours of fun building and fiddling with the little things.
I feel like "Lego sucks now" has become a meme that people just repeat without ever actually testing it. They look at a few kits in the store, pick out whatever details fit their preconceptions, and sneer about it on the internet. Try it! Go down to the store and buy a Lego kit. If you don't like the licensed jobbies, I highly recommend the Creator line; they tend towards straightforward vehicles and animals and robots and stuff, and most of them actually come with complete instructions for three different things per set. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.