Demonac recently sent me a link that went into some length of the history of Derpy... and I fear that I now know waaaay too much about Bronys and their influence on Hasbro.
To put it in TFs terms, Derpy is like a wrongly coloured TFs character in the background of an episode, like this one or this one.
This one would be a good example of a minor animation error (Bluestreak with Bumblebee head). In Derpy's case, it was just a wrongly drawn eye... yes, that's all it took to snowball among Bronys to create so much interest in a "new" character that Hasbro eventually acknowledged it as a new character in the cartoon (briefly, before re-editing the episode to remove it... because of people saying that it was making fun of people with disorders). Despite the (minor) negative publicity, it seems that someone at Hasbro thought it would be a good idea to create a toy and hope it doesn't get too much negative attention.
It also means that Hasbro is acknowledging/accepting the Brony fanbase (males, mostly adult), for a young girl toyline.

So going back to TFs, what if we'd had the massive online communities back during Gen1 when that animation error of Bluestreak occurred... you can imagine that a similar campaign would have started up to have something created from it, like a toy or a character.

(it's ironic - while I was searching on google for a particular TFs animation error, a picture of Derpy showed up... I WAS SEARCHING TRANSFORMERS!)


As for the prices (to be on-topic), it's certainly one good thing about being shafted with prices in Australia... we don't think much of higher priced American exclusives, because they aren't expensive to what we are used to. But I imagine that Americans are upset about having to pay 50-100% more for their Cliffjumper & Bruticus toys (based on the Deluxe class only being US$12-15 there). To most Americans, the regular retail Bruticus will only cost them about US$60, so I imagine that an extra $40 for a fancy box isn't easy for some to accept.