I love the Fanholes podcast and they love Transformers. There is lots of praise in their archives for IDW but recently they did a look back on all that went wrong with TF comics under Ryall and the gang:

https://fanholespodcast.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-top-fifteen-worst-transformers.html

What a great list of terrible things. Everything that turned me off to IDW from All Hail Megatron to how they handled Beast Wars and much more inbetween is here. It's a retrospective of all the misfires, mistakes, disasters, disappointments and cringeworthy IDW moments. All the lowlights that saved me so much money because I quit reading Transformers are here. Plus the disappointments arising from projects that didn't come to fruition or were left incomplete are also included. It's fun in the same way that going to the funeral of someone you hate is fun. Oh, the memories.

On Wednesday, January 4, 2023 at 1:04:41 AM UTC-5, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:
> I love the Fanholes podcast and they love Transformers. There is lots of praise in their archives for IDW but recently they did a look back on all that went wrong with TF comics under Ryall and the gang:
>
> https://fanholespodcast.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-top-fifteen-worst-transformers.html
>
> What a great list of terrible things. Everything that turned me off to IDW from All Hail Megatron to how they handled Beast Wars and much more inbetween is here. It's a retrospective of all the misfires, mistakes, disasters, disappointments and cringeworthy IDW moments. All the lowlights that saved me so much money because I quit reading Transformers are here. Plus the disappointments arising from projects that didn't come to fruition or were left incomplete are also included. It's fun in the same way that going to the funeral of someone you hate is fun. Oh, the memories.

Great link.

Biggest let-down: Mike Costa+Don Figueroa's run. Costa did wonders with G.I..Joe for IDW, and the Don was a fan-made-good whose work on War Within was superb. Their work for IDW, on the other hand, was barely readable, with stilted dialogue and designs that make Beast Machines Nightscream look like Gisele Bundchen.

Die a Hero: James Roberts is responsible for some of the best fiction to come out of this franchise, including Last Stand of the Wreckers, and the massive novel, Eugenesis. What a shame that he started going off the rails as the acclaimed MTMTE series ran on. By the end, he almost seemed to be trolling the fans by forcing EVERY SINGLE SLAGGING CHARACTER into a relationship (including the very troubling Cyclonus-Tailgate ship). No bonds of brotherhood allowed - only tender glances and romantic yearnings. Drift and Ratchet's odd couple bickering? Two bots in love. And so on, and so forth, until Lost Light prioritized his political views over telling a story. Biggest letdown: turning the morally complex Getaway into a cartoon villain, replete with Donald Trump quotes, in case any one didn't get the message about how evil he was. The worst part was that Roberts essentially ripped this arc from his own Eugenesis, except he did it better in his self-published fan-novel without oversight or editing than he did here.

IDW was and is garbage. I couldn't even finish reading the article
because it reminded me of things I'd tried to forget.

I wish they would just work to reprint the old stuff and not even bother
trying (and failing) to make new comics. I don't think they ever
finished reprinting the UK stuff, nor the G2 comics.

MASK has also never been reprinted, AFAIK.