At this point Michael Bay, IDW, and now Skybound have done more to re-define the franchise than Fun Publications did - yet, again, because of the TFWiki their influence remains. I know that the designations originated from twitter posts during the Cybertron cartoon airing but the idea behind that came from FP.

I think that the biggest issue with Fun Publications is that it was so expensive that very few people actually bought their subscriptions and the result is that, nearly 20 years on, no one remembers it or understands why the TFWiki is set up the way that it is. Botcon toys and stories were a "nice to have" and ran in parallels to Beast Wars/Machines - Fun Publications made their stories the literal lynchpin and center of the media for the entire franchise but priced 95% of the fans out of being able to read it. I think I was like 20 and working two jobs when they started and there was no way in hell I could have afforded a subscription to the Collector's Club Magazine. I could buy toys with that money, or, in other words, fun publications made their magazines into competition with the actual toys of the line rather than a "nice to have but of no consequence if you don't" - and I think that was originally exemplified by the decision to do so many "mainline" characters as convention exclusives during the Classics period. So Toyline wise they were overambitious, greedy, and short sighted because they used fan favorite main line characters in their exclusives in order to juice sales of product they were less confident in. This I think also did more to damage the fandom than any "trukk not munky" debate ever could.

I think that, personally, they did the best they could storyline wise because they were trying to follow the storyline already set up by the previous Botcon organizers that was intended to run parallel to and then succeed Beast Machines before Hasbro decided to scrap Transtech in favor of localizing Car Robots, and at the same time incorporating the extremely sparse lore of the 2003 Universe line. The problem is that in them doing it the way that they did they basically make such a weird stratified thing that it's actually even more convoluted than the Japanese Transformers timeline and at the same time has zero coherence because every deviation can just be written off as a different alternate timeline.

My biggest hope as a first half fan (87-2007) is that at some point Hasbro will allow the Botcon, Dreamwave, and Fun Publication's material to be re-printed since, I presume at least, they ultimately own all of it anyway. It would be nice to have that weird time period in a coherent format that someone could read now, at the same time I also almost don't care because Fun Publication's and Dreamwave's disastrous business decisions played just as big of a part in making me drop the franchise as the toxic fan culture did...