I grew up with LEGOs, and by "grew up", I mean I had a twin-mattress-sized drawer full of the colorful little plastic bricks for most of my childhood and teenagehood, right up until I went to college and my parents told me I had to either take them with me, or they would donate them.  Seeing as how space is at a premium in college dormitories, and I did not relish the thought of having to pack and move them every academic year, I opted for the latter - and the found a nice home at one of the Fisher Houses across the nation - cannot ask for a better fate for a toy than that.  However, I have been keeping my eye on the toys despite having very few to my name at the moment, and I have noted a disturbing trend that has been increasing over the years, and started some time ago - the use of "cheater" pieces.  Basically, LEGOs have a crapton of basic pieces, from which you can build just about anything.  But, sometimes, designs call for a specific feature that would either be too complicated to build with basic pieces, or would require too many basic pieces, or it is simply not capable of being built with basic pieces, so the LEGO engineers go and generate up another cast, and make a spiffy new part... that is really only applicable to the model for which it was cast.  Sure, any good LEGO user can find a use for any LEGO piece in any future model... but it always seemed like cheating to me.  Imagine my dismay when I stumbled across this most recent instance of "cheater" pieces... some of the bits of plastic in the past were kind of disappointing in how much the simplified models, but this is taking it to a whole new level.  (Image below the fold.)