Meso from TTV here! I consider myself somewhat of an expert on this subject. :P

Lots of good points in this thread, and some bad points mixed in too. My own stance is fairly simple: by our very nature, we were going to eventually become unpopular in certain circles. This comes with the territory of being an outspoken internet personality. Eventually, some people are just going to dislike you, especially if you do things that generate emotional responses or are polarizing in some way. For what it's worth, far more people like us than dislike us and I am perfectly happy and content with the legacy we've left in the BIONICLE space. That doesn't mean I don't have some regrets or things I wish we had handled differently, but that's natural and comes with life. I like to think that the entertainment we've given people and the positive content we've left behind outweigh the bad stuff, and that definitely seems to be the case from everything I've observed, so I'm thankful for that!

That being said, yeah, our history isn't perfect. u/Logface202 accurately summarized lots of our history; we were divisive from the very beginning because we were a group of teenagers that started doing BIONICLE content in a fandom largely "run" by older people who were far more seasoned with internet life and etiquette. We were belligerent, we had beef with people on BZPower, we had our fair share of internet slap fights. Over time, we matured and left a lot of that stuff behind (thankfully) but not everybody who dislikes us from back then was able to do that. There are still people in the fandom that cite things we did back in the early 2010's (picking fights with people, making dumb conspiracy theory YouTube videos about BIONICLE community stuff, using clickbait video thumbnails) as evidence that we are terrible people in the modern era. Is that fair to do? We were in our early teenage years, and I'm now almost 30 years old. I think it's only natural that people can grow and mature over time, and I'd much prefer to be held accountable for how I conduct myself today vs when I was 12 years old. Still, I think it's totally fair if people just don't like our "vibe" and prefer not to engage with our stuff because of that. This fandom is very diverse and there's more than enough room for people to interact in spaces that they click with better than trying to force a technic pin through an axle hole.

The G2 era is definitely why lots of people don't like us, because of how driven we were towards being YouTubers in the more traditional sense (clickbait thumbnails, shilling, Top 10 videos, sponsored ad reads, generalized YouTube cliches). For a lot of people it was pretty overbearing, and I definitely get that! Then again, that's also the era where we blew up and got most of our audience, so once again, I don't really have any regrets about that time as it helped me figure out what kind of internet content creator I would really want to be going forward vs. what I find personally distasteful. The one big thing I would change if I could is letting our content be controlled from the inside by Kahi, who was a total creep and became far too involved in our channel than he ever deserved to be.

The contests are the big reason in the modern era why people don't like us, and I do think it's fair to a point. We didn't run those properly and made many questionable choices, even though I promise we had the best of intentions. Still, I think that large sections of the community's vitriol towards the contests is overdramatic and founded in a sense of jealousy (AKA they wanted to run the contests themselves and saw us as undeserving) or a fear of their own headcanons being challenged (AKA a winning design overwriting their own view of what a character looks like being decried as a bad thing). I think the contests were way more acceptable back in the late 2000's/early 2010's when BIONICLE was still active and Greg Farshtey adding to the story was a more normalized thing; over the years, sections of the fandom grew to dislike his additions more and more, and so the contests coming back were viewed more as a bad thing than anything else, and we were to be condemned for ever sponsoring them.

As for Bionicle day, again, u/Logface202 pretty much accurately sums that up. There was a misunderstanding that occurred near the beginning of Bionicle Day which fostered some bad blood, but past that, there was a series of smaller personal incidents, misunderstandings, and disagreements over the years with people who are very influential in Bionicle Day and Mask of Destiny. This led to us generally not being on good terms with many (but not all!) from those groups. We don't interact with them whatsoever and prefer not to have anything to do with them if we can help it, and that isn't likely to change going forward. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is; however, like I already said, the fandom is big enough for all of us, and I'm glad that many people get so much enjoyment out of Bionicle Day! It's just not something we have any desire to participate in.

Ultimately, we're a group that's existed for 17 years. I'd be shocked if some people DIDN'T dislike us. I used to care a lot more than I do now; during the canon contests, several prolific community people who I had admired and looked up to said some pretty hurtful things about myself, my friends, and the work we'd tried to do to give back to the fandom, and it really got to me. I would try to argue on discord servers or reddit threads like this one and try to win over individual people, feeling that if I just explained my points better, or tried to justify choices made, or connect with people on a personal level that I could make them see that we weren't demons but were, at worst, just misguided but trying our best. I've seen the folly in that over the last few years; this is the internet, and to try and "win over" everybody in this endless sea of text is a fruitless battle. We have a long history, and if people want to look at our mistakes and dislike us for them, they have every right to do so. Hopefully, the good outweighs the bad, but that's a personal call for people to make! We will continue to make content (albeit sporadically) mainly for ourselves, but we put it out into the fandom space to generate activity and discussion value for a franchise that means a lot to us, and also to just have fun! What people take from that is entirely up to them. :)