Quote Originally Posted by Bidoofdude View Post
I generally divide it in my mind into the US cartoon run years, the JP cartoon (Headmasters to Zone) years, and the tail end proto-G2 years.
* US cartoon years = 1984-87
* JP cartoon years = 1987-90 - so you have an overlap there with 1987, unless you just want to arbitrarily declare 1987 to be a JP cartoon year since The Headmasters was a much longer series than Sunbow Season Four
* Proto-G2 year = Early 1993. It was only the early 1993 G1 Transformers that would be later repackaged as G2.
Your division does not account for 1991 and 1992.

Quote Originally Posted by Bidoofdude View Post
Stuff like this is often extremely variable between individuals, so I think rigid categories are mostly not useful, but that's my opinion.
Meh, this poll is just asking which method you prefer, not method you think is necessarily the best. It's like being on a flight and you're offered a choice of meals between chicken, fish or vegetarian. Neither might be what you actually want to eat, but the flight attendant is asking you to make a choice based on your preference. Or you could choose to skip the meal and that's fine too. And at the end of the day, this is just an opinion poll. It's not like we're voting in a new government or anything.

Many systems of classification are inherently arbitrary. Why are Europe, Africa and Asia classified as separate continents even though it's one big land mass? How are the UK and the Philippines considered part of the continents of Europe and Asia respectively when they're islands unconnected to continental land masses? What counts as a planet and why? Are viruses living or non-living? Why are Bosnian and Croatian considered different languages despite having a high level of mutual intelligibility, but mutually unintelligible Cantonese and Mandarin are classified as dialects of Chinese? Why are North and South Korea recognised as separate sovereign states, but Taiwan is not recognised as being separate from China? Why do we call the 10th month of the year "OCTOber" when it means "Eighth month"? Why are the letters W and Y classified as consonants when they can sometimes be pronounced as vowels? etc etc etc. Je ne c'est pas. Ultimately we just decide on general consensus to help us make sense of the world and just run with it, even if it doesn't always make sense.