I can totally relate to the Combaticon Brawl story. The first Combaticon I had was G2 Blast Off. For a long time, I used that toy as a substitute Astrotrain (I wanted Astrotrain but got into Transformers too late and missed out). I think its because of this that I'm more emotionally attached to Blast Off than Astrotrain. If they ever release the Special Edition CW Blast Off in G2 colours, I'd buy it for sure. But given a choice, I'd wouldn't want to pay for all 5 Combaticons just to have a white and purple Blast Off.

I think the points you raised compelled me to prefer buying Combiners as individual components rather than as a box set. I just wish they made it easier to acquire all 5 Dinobots or all 5 Terrorcons simultaneously in PotP, instead of making one or two figures of each faction available in-store, then forcing us to buy the rest online due to shoddy distribution. I think it's great that we can have modern iterations of the Terrorcons, but we shouldn't have to go online and pay extra shipping costs, go through various obstacles, and/or sacrifice an animal to a pagan deity; just to have a complete Abominus (or Volcanus).

I think maybe it would have been better if Hasbro arranged the wave assortments so that all the Dinobots appear in wave 1 and all the Terrorcons get released in wave 2 - Just like how all the wave 3 Deluxes in Combiner Wars were Protectobots, and all of the wave 5 Deluxes were Combaticons. It would suck a little to wait longer if you're a fan of only one of the teams, but at least you'd get the whole team.