Thanks for all of the updates Pete.
I am shocked these did not pop up on eBay yet as I have been looking. I hope some etailors or Disney themselves can help out collecting these. This will be a long haul to collect the series but eventually I can see these showing up at Toy shows and comic cons at jacked up prices.
As of right now, Disney has no plans on offering the parts in boxes or in any other format than you coming to the park, standing in line, standing in front of the work bench and making your own droid(s). As far as Disney is concerned a major part of the program is the "personal experience" you get from digging through the parts and making the droid you want.
That being said, since they have indicated that it will be a long term installation at the Tatooine Traders, I don't think that building your own will ever go away.
But while I was there on Saturday in my marathon building session that lasted 2.5-3 hours, there were several parents with kids who, while the kid wanted to do it, the parents were like "I've gotta wait for my son to pick through all of those parts to build a droid and THEN pay $12 for it? No way, we're on a schedule to see this whole park in one day, are you sure I can't just buy Johnny a box of parts?"
Now of course, I'm paraphrasing - but very few parents seemed to be willing to "wait" for one kid in their party to build a droid. And I think over time, that feedback from families will one day result in taking the 71 parts, adding an additional R2-D2 dome (to make it 72) and then splitting those parts up into two boxes of 36 parts each and letting a parent quickly grab one or both boxes, make the quick purchase and be on to the next attraction.
It's like what Paul was talking about with the Build-your-own-Lightsaber station (another "permanent" fixture of the store), you can either let your kid spend time building the lightsaber OR the store carries all of the same lightsaber products that every other store already carries - so if a kid wanted a lightsaber both options are available.
So in the long-run, I could totally see them EVENTUALLY making an option for box sets. I could totally even see them doing it with unique color-schemes on the parts in the box sets to make them a desireable purchase to someone who already picked up a lot of the parts via the build-your-own-option...