...that's the thing with Beast Machines. It's too adult. And not in a pr0nographic way -- you can see that it's heavily rooted in deep philosophy with much less... well... FUN! As you've noticed that Maximals do a LOT of running from the Vehicons. And that "seeds of the future..." line gets really old fast (it's even worse than Spiderman's "With great power comes great responsibility"!)

When they made Beast Machines it's like they forgot that Transformers is meant to be for kids. Engaging adult audiences is good too, but you can't neglect the kids -- and even adult TF audiences like to watch some fun. Then you have Michael Bay who just injects juvenile adolescent humour into Transformers <sigh>

The G1 Marvel Comics and Beast Wars were just fantastic in terms of appealing to both older audiences and kids at the same time. You had deep themes and complex story arcs running alongside lots of action-packed and adventure.

There are also certain elements of Beast Machines continuity that conflicts with Beast Wars. Based on just the first 6 eps, you can see that BM Megatron is an entirely different character from BW Megatron. BW Megatron is a character devoid of morality - one who revelled in being evil (e.g. in The Agenda Part 3 he laughs after saying "evil triumphs!"). Yet BM Megatron has this messiah complex where he sees himself as Cybertron's saviour and is a highly moral character (it just so happens that his moral values are at odds with Optimus Primal's values). There is no definitive good or evil in this story -- which in itself is pretty cool, but to suddenly change Megatron from being a morally bankrupt character to one who's taken a moral highground on maintaining Cybertron's technological purity is a massive and ill explained leap.

Then there's his phobia for organics... where the slag did THAT come from?!? (o_O) The series kinda pretends that it was there the whole time... uhhh... ooookkkkaaaaayyyy... <slowly.backs.away>

As for the Transformers aesthetic or "feel" -- I think the "unTFness" comes from the Maximals. The Vehicons still look pretty TFlike, but the Maximals are technorganic -- something we've never seen in Transformers (aside from the G1 Trans-Organics and Cybertronian Demons -- but they're like "monsters" and not the Transformers themselves). The attempt to fuse organics with the Transformers took it in a unique direction. You'll need to keep watching to see where that leads to.