I haven't had a close look at Lego bricks for years until a few weeks ago and got a chance to compare that with copycat set. That made me extremely aware of the high level of quality that a Lego set has: the bricks are extremely well made and durable, the sets are working and (more or less) exciting and the build instructions are designed meticulously to make it clear where everything needs to go. The instructions are broken into smaller steps for kits aimed at younger children.

One thing they seem to have lost over the years is the flexibility of the kits: I remember many kits having instructions for several alternate models, encouraging you much more to take things apart again after building. Newer kits are mostly a single model and that limits the fun that you end up having with them. The invitation to tinker seems gone.

Yes, the re-build aspect is almost gone. As I kid I got maybe 5-10 original sets over a 10 year period, and a few bags of random bricks, and I played and played with that. Nowadays the idea is more build and forget. If you're lucky they'll play a bit with the finished model, but they don't seem to be making their own.

One fun fact about the instructions, I recently learned from a Lego designer that the reason they use many different colours on the inside of most models is to make it easier to see what's going on while you're building. That explanation never occurred to me, but maybe it's obvious.

I think the real reason colors have exploded is that it forces you to buy the set to build the model, you can't build models from other sets if the colors are different. Well, you can, but most people are above that level of OCD.

I noticed this after buying a crapton of legos on craigslist for, um, my new kid! I do have a new kid, but anyway, the colors vary far too much now.

Charitably, the colors probably subtly act like antialising does in rasterization, so it might make a blocky model seem more organic. But I think the business of selling more sets is also a sneaky reason.

I’m talking about differently coloured bricks on the inside of a model. That is definitely not some nefarious scheme to make you buy more lego.

Nowadays there are so many custom pieces and people don’t really rebuild much anyway, so they don’t even need to discourage what you describe using colours.

There is an excellent and extensive range of Creator 3-in-1 sets, as well as the entire Classic line which encourages specifically this. For the themed sets, they stopped including ideas on the back of the box because people would complain that instructions weren't included.

> For the themed sets, they stopped including ideas on the back of the box because people would complain that instructions weren't included.

This is why we can’t have good things sigh

I still have a collection of original instructions from the mid-70s onward: I'm guessing they are potentially more valuable than the actual bricks that my kids have now outgrown.