Nice review and great figure. Personally, I think the cons you mentioned are pretty minor to me. The shoulders and smokestacks look fine to me and the bucket is a little weird but very clever in what they've been able to do there. I can see how, if you know the type of real-world vehicles well (I'm very jealous), these inaccuracies would be more of an issue though.

Can we just take a minute to appreciate that the bucket actually goes up and down? The bucket is made from all 4 limbs which come together nicely. Not only that, but for the bucket to move they needed to position all 4 pivots so that they were lined up along the same axis or else it wouldn't have worked. That must have been a fun challenge to design around, but they pulled it off.

I reckon this one would be worth the price of admission even if it was just a regular Transformer without the combining mode.