Specifically, designers from the 3rd party realm who've proven themselves.

The success of the recent MPs - it seems by far the most popular line at the moment - makes me wonder why they don't just crank out more. I don't know their workload nor what really goes into making them (sketches to production), and don't know the costs (other than the vague "molds are expensive"). I'm sure many designs are on the drawing board, but for whatever reason, the actual releases are really spread out for the most part.

It seems that they only have 1 Masterpiece designer working at a time (forgetting Star Saber since it's an anomaly). The collector market, however small it may be compared to the children's market, has basically said they will eat up any and all Masterpiece toys that come out. It must be a profitable venture, so you could only assume that making more would be even more profitable.

The third parties are cranking these things out at a rate of knots. Fans Toys in particular - half way through their Dinobots, Perceptor and Reflector incoming. I don't see how what is presumably just a tiny company can put out such high quality toys (often at comparatively cheaper than official prices, considering the size and materials used), so quickly! And while they're the most obvious choice for MP grade toys, several of the other 3rd parties have exhibited extremely capable design skills as well. TakaraTomy is a huge company, you'd think it should be no challenge whatsoever for them to compete with "the little guys" - and if you can't beat em - hire em! These days all it'd take is a Facebook message for them to get in contact with say xTransbots, work out a deal so their Apollyon became Megatron for real, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Masterpiece has already run for 11 years, so it stands as one of (if not the) longest running toy lines as it is, which is a feat in and of itself. But those 11 years have only amounted to 22 basic releases to date, even less when you subtract redecos. There's a huge number of popular characters remaining, and i'd argue they could straight up release any character from G1 and collector fans would buy them in droves. There's enough characters left that at the current snails pace, the line could go on for decades - but why not get some more talented people on deck and really go hard at the collector market and give the fans more!

I don't really believe there's any risk in "flooding" a collector market with fantastic toys. The example that springs to mind is Mattel who have released one or more MOTUC toys at a monthly pace since 2010! Obviously Transformers are more complex but the point is, fans are still buying, even as they release characters who only showed up for a single episode (or none at all!)

Is it a Japanese honour kind of thing or do they just not want my money?!