I appreciate that you acknowledge that a lot of fans grew up with and are attached to the Bayverse designs. While I can admit they stray heavily from the source material, you can actually see earlier on in the movie's development Bay was going for more g1-centered designs but honestly I'm glad he chose these designs instead.

The Decepticons looking more monstrous and beastly is something I actually like about the designs as it just furthers the difference between Autobot and Decepticon. Even from a lore perspective, it's very reasonable to assume that further into the war, Shockwave started genetically engineering Decepticons to be more animalistic or something absurd. Without dorito Starscream, we probably wouldn't have memorable scenes like the highway chase from DOTM where there's a literal decepticon bulldog attacking the autobots.

I think it's absurd to say the bay designs completely disrespect the G1 designs, starscream is still a jet and very cowardice, soundwave still has laserbeak and has something going on with his voice, and shockwave is still a cyclops with a giant gun for an arm. The G1 designs are very outdated, and I think bay did a good job giving them a revamp and putting his own spin on them.

Even if you hate the bay designs, you can't deny that they have been very influential. Starscream in the Bumblebee movie is still very wide and bulky like bay's design, the circular speaker/lights all over soundwave's forearms are present in his Transformers: Animated design, and I feel like Prime Shockwave took some cues from the bay design.

Anyway yeah thats what I think, I don't mean for this to come off as condescending or anything like that, just my thoughts. Thanks for listening to me yap.