>>149897213
I like Nightshade as a character but as you said they are incredibly underused. In Season 1 their role in the show made sense but in Season 2 onwards they just become this background element and only sometimes contributes for basic science stuff (and even that is rare when there are times where being a scientist would be helpful but he just contributes nothing).

I think the worst aspect of their lack of character was how the writers completely wrote Tarantulas out of the show. Without him Nightshade had literally no chemistry with any of the other characters in the show.

I also think they kneecapped Nightshade's character with awful way they revealed they were non binary. I think they had planned for it to be built up over the first season based on Nightshade's moments throughout the show but they probably found out they were going to go on hiatus just after introducing the new Terrans so they inserted that awkward scene of Mo telling Optimus of Nightshade's pronouns.

It's actually a shame they went that route because I think Nightshade being non-binary wouldn't have been as much of an issue if you didn't have that scene and instead it was something built up over the season. But I think that was Earthspark's problem in general it wanted to have it's cake and eat it too. Not just with Nightshade but alot of things are just glossed over and we just get the end result (like the origin of Dot and Megs friendship was explained in a book and not the show itself).

>>149897594
From what I understand both Airachnid and Knockout's toys suffered due to the budget. A couple of other later figures also got hit by these budget issues. The cheap retool Beast Hunter toys meant that some of the other characters who hadn't got toys up to that point weren't as affected. Like Smokescreen and Shockwave who got pretty decent toys.