You know how anal I am about SW figures generally, and I tend to carry that over to historical figures too, but ultimately I try to take the stance that they're mass release, and fairly inexpensive toys too... So the Tiger-I with mish-mash of late and early production details never bothered me much... The only thing I was ever really truly annoyed with was that I couldn't rotate my quad .50 half-track's turret because they didn't make the angled cuts in the side armor.
To me though they did great for $5... They just didn't have good business sense. They needed to focus less on putting out tons of $50 toys, and more on getting multiple figure waves out in a year, and focus on the $20 and less vehicles to back them up. Vehicles that could be repainted, or chassis reworking could make it a "new" toy. Unfortunately they were so fixated on putting out plane after plane, repaints, and the like, all at the higher pricepoints, that I think they hurt themselves with that. Plus they never, ever, ever, made revisions to case assortments. When you see Figure A stagnates, but B, C, D, E, and F all sold out immediately, you need to revise your assortments... Drop the jeep driver, and put in another rifleman.
They JUST started to "improve" in that regard with reworking old figures with a new paintjob, but it was too late. WM was basically on their way out of their deal with 21st, soured on all the figures that wouldn't move because of lack of revisions, plus the umpteenth P-47 repaint when there were still 30 of the original 2 paintjobs on the shelves... Stupidity like that can only mean bad things in the future (not to mention they were dealing almost exclusively with WM, which is horrible, for some years).
Like I said, I wasn't 100% picky... If they gave us Germans and they had the jackboots but were later war figures, I was ok with that. It's a $5 figure, so I can live with a ****** paintjob now and then or whatnot, so long as we get more variety at some point... Now though the line's kicked over it seems.
Forces of Valor did great WW2 figures IMO. Lots of gear, good articulation and sculpts that I felt were on par with the best from BBI and 21st. I'm hopeful they may continue their work with WW2. I'm hoping for a wave of US and German paratroopers. Their vehicles are not amazing by comparison to the other companies, but I'm going to move into 1:16 scale armor anyway. It looks fine with the support vehicles I have in 1:18 now, and there's a ton more diversity in 1:16. There's just no RC Sherman out yet for a reasonable price that I'm aware of, and I realy, really love Shermans and their variants.
I was never much of a plane guy, though I own probably 10 aircraft. Not my cup of tea though, and 21st did the majority of what's out there, so I don't feel so bad about that. I did really want that B-25 though. Man that thing was gonna be sweet.
I think that, the last 2 large playsets they never made, and any future armor/figure possibilities are what hurt the most. Only 21st had the balls to try that stuff.
