It's pretty obvious why there are so many exclusives in CHUG now. As of this year CHUG has been in production for 13 years. CHUG has existed for about half a decade longer than G1 itself! It's little wonder that a lot of these toys being released are limited exclusives because most of the better known and more popular characters have already been done as CHUGs. Most of what's left are lesser known characters who may not sell as strongly as mass retail releases.



Now I know that as fans most if not all of the characters being released in Siege are already known to us. But that's because we're fanatical about Transformers (the very meaning of the word "fan" itself as a shortening of "fanatic"). But look at it from a non-fan's POV, because that's part of the market appeal of store-released repaints. Repaints themselves can be a hard sell to the general market but repaints that make obscure references? Let's look at what we're getting from Selects so far...
* Combat Megatron: a repaint of the store-released Siege Megatron based on an aborted prototype of 1994's G2 Combat Megatron
* Galactic Man Shockwave: a repaint of the store-released Siege Shockwave based on the pre-Transformer version of Shockwave released via Radio Shack in the 80s
* Autobot Lancer: redeco/retool of the store-released Moonracer mould based on what was a generic background character who appeared in only 1 episode of the G1 cartoon
* Redwing: based on a BotCon exclusive toy that was conceived by mistake and never even made. I've got to be honest, I didn't even know who he was and had to look it up.
* Nightbird: an obscure and formerly Obscure character from the G1 cartoon
* Cromar and Zetar: if they were any more obscure than this then we'd be looking at a CHUG Time Warrior (yes please!)

With the sole exception of Smokescreen, we can see that all of these Selects toys are repaints based on obscure (and formerly Obscure) characters. They're not widely known and they're all repaints. Not that long ago all of these toys would've only been possible as BotCon exclusives. Today they're made available as mail-away figures which makes them far more accessible than convention exclusive toys.
I'm personally quite happy that we're getting these toys, and the idea of plain-packaged mail-away exclusives is reminiscent of the G1 mail-aways. How fitting is it that Powerdasher is being released as a mail-away exclusive toy? If only they required us to clip and send in Robot Points from the store released toys!