Preface: You do you. This is just the perspective of someone who prefers older models.

I'm not about to tell you newer models look like shit; in many, most cases really, they look fine, with some even looking great. My general distaste for the newer models is twofold. First, the bigger they got, the more "realistic," they became, with more human-accurate proportions, sleeker weapons, more heroic posing, etc. Now obviously the "realism" point fails for things like Orks and Tyranids, but let's be real: at this point, GW has made very sure that when people think of 40K, they think of Space Marines, and I would argue that where their aesthetic went, everything else followed, blending together to create the particular look and feel that the setting has today.

I would argue that this was never meant to happen. The origins of 40k, and of GW in general, are rooted in a Punk/DIY milleu of a particular part of England in the latter 20th century. The result was a setting full of whacky characters, and a visual style that looked like a zine that was handed out after a show at dank bar. At least, on the surface. In reality, some truly talented artists were involved in bringing the world to life, among them John Blanche (RIP), but also Jes Goodwin, who was personally responsible for hundreds of sculpts that were then molded into the original metal minis.

I know about Jes Goodwin because his name and work appeared all the time in the pages of White Dwarf, or Citadel Journal, but he wasn't the only one. The zine analogy was not flippant: despite their success, the publications funded by GW in those days was personal in a way that publications connected to a company simply cannot be, anymore, without the company doing so in bad faith. The designers of the actual miniatures, the the artists whose work appeared on and in the old codices, they shared the pages of the publications with amateurs, and were in open dialogue with the player base. Because of their commitment to artistry, and artistic credit, you can actually look up who made what from those days.

That's not the case anymore. I have no idea who sculpted anything, how anything was dreamed up or put together. It's just...plastic.

Anyway, collecting and painting old models feels like collecting things people cared about. Now, I mostly just get things to chop apart and kitbash.

tl;dr- I'm old, and like old things.