It should be noted that, to my knowledge, there's nothing to stop TakaraTomy from having all Movie toys with superior paint decos to their Hasbro counterparts, considering the higher retail price they are sold at (as well as the accompanying higher budgets). Hasbro paints the way they do because they need to sell it to retailers who sell them for $10-12USD. TakaraTomy's versions have a RRP that's twice as much, and have a per-figure paint budget that allows for considerably more paint to be used.

Also note that TakaraTomy toylines with better paint jobs (or simply more paint used, regardless of if its appropriate or not), tend to be non-movie lines, ie, Transformers lines without a big international movie to help sell toys.

I wonder, does TakaraTomy feel that because the big movie helps sell considerably more Transformers than they would normally sell (perhaps mainly to kids), that they don't need to "try as hard"? The movie toys with significantly different paint decos appear to be special collector-focused releases (like Buster Prime and the "Masterpiece" decos).