I'm somewhat depressed by how explicitly Lego is marketing towards 30-something man-children who build things to put them on the shelf. The worst part is that this model-kit design style is spilling over and infecting their actual toy themes. It's harder for kids to repurpose a set that's built 40% out of small tiles and cheese wedges and little greebly bits.
The kids spilled over their Lego box a few days ago - so many unusable and pointless 1x1 round pieces, special weird shapes, etc. Its all the sets which are fun to build but seem more like a puzzle than a Lego set which you can really reuse, rebuild, etc. I'm not normally nostalgic, but my box as a child used to be all real blocks and I could build great stuff. Now its more marketing to sell more and more branded set…
Even the varied array of "one-off" weirdly specific pieces always find an unexpected application in a pinch somewhere. I've been recently quite entertained by the creative work of a Dublin lego-er making pubs (with many many small 1x1 round pieces, and a selection of weird one-offs for signage/etc.) https://snapwidget.com/embed/927292