AAOP: Simple, convienience. Autobots were in, Maximals were out as the Transformers heroes. And presumably to create less confusion to their target demographic and the retailers. Be strange to have him in RID packaging and yet have absolutely nothing to do with RID.

Before somebody mentions different, BM-based packaging for him, there's the brand association. The TF brand at the time was RID, they hadn't done multiple concurrent lines yet, and considering Beast Machines was a dissapointment, they obviously didn't want to package such a large and expensive toy as a 'Beast Machines' product. The kids would have probably ignored him since he would have been part of last year's line.


Now, I don't get why you guys are so bent out of shape over the Mini-Cons being assigned to Armada, considering that they're not the same Mini-Con characters from the Classics line, so they can be Armada universe Mini-Cons who just happen to have the same body types as Mini-Cons from a different universe.

Armada is the most appropriate place for Mini-Con toys, so in they go (and its likely that when Hasbro say 'Armada series', they probably mean 'Unicron Trilogy', since the UT is an unofficial term, though used internally by Hasbro.)