I'd been thinking about it a bit more since the advent of the Alternators. For where the car panels end up in robot mode, there's just far, far too many moving parts on some of the designs.

This isn't to say that minimalism equals perfection per se: toys like Throttlebots and Firecons (and some Minicons) have very few parts but their modes suffer for it.

Perhaps the definition should be that elegance is the minimal number of parts or movements required to achieve a given effect, and is more of a factor as the effect in question becomes more awesome.

Perhaps there's some kind of awesomeness-to-item ratio...