Quote Originally Posted by STL
Much like Classic 2.0 Ironhide's alt mode suffers way too much because the mold is too ambitious.
Making a cartoon-like G1 Ironhide/Ratchet toy would always be a very ambitious endeavour. The fact is that the cartoon/comics cheated by basically making 2/3 of the vehicle (which became the platform on the robot toy) vanish into thin air. Ratchet's platform was seen briefly in the cartoon and in the comics it was only seen in the very early issues when the art was still predominantly toy-accurate... but for the most part the platforms just disappeared.

In making a cartoon/comic-like Ratchet/Ironhide toy your options are to either:
1/ Maintain the battle platform. They did this with BotCon Ratchet and Ironhide. Or...
2/ Incorporate the entire vehicle into the robot form. This is what they did with Universe/Henkei...

But the extra challenge is to try and make the robot form look as cartoon/comic-like as possible; essentially they had to try and hide 2/3 of the vehicle in robot form!! That's a bloody hard job to do! On top of that they had budget limitations (i.e.: it still has to be sold at the Deluxe price point which limits the amount of engineering you can put into it). So taking that into account I think HasTak did a reasonably good job with the mould. Yes, it's kibble-licious... but that's the price of having a "show-accurate" Ironhide for you.