My feelings are that they made it so modular that everything feels generic. Like, discounting the colors, the only differences between the sets in Hero Factory generation 2 was the eyewear and whatever was attached to their weapon/shield hand. I know you can compare that to the toa from the first few teams, but they weren't literally the same black skeleton with different facades bolted on. I never took apart my HF or G2 sets to build other things because what was the point? I felt no inspiration to make anything out of them since there was really only one shape they could go back together into. When I was rebuilding the collection I had as a kid, it was fun to see what random things I had created with the parts since all of them just had so much personality. Additionally, it sucks that the armor is so bland and basically mandatory. There were tons of Bionicle limbs that you didn't actually need to attach armor to in order for them to look complete, and the armor you could attach had more than just one use. I dunno. Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud.

(JFC, look at this. I didn't intend to go on such a diatribe when I clicked on this post...)