Wasting a bunch of money on Lego is kinda my jam, and wasting my money on THIS PARTICULAR kind of Lego is especially my jam.

Used to have one of these around when I got married, bought some *very* expensive "Impossible" film to take have people use the Polaroid camera to take pictures but ended up with the much cheaper FujiFilm camera instead.

Anyway, the article by The Verge is interesting in a bunch of ways, but one I didn't realize was the limited new piece budget sets get... which explains why sometimes they have to do a lot of mangling to get a bunch of little pieces to make somewhat that seems like it would be easier to just have as a single new type.

Lego’s picker system requires each printed piece to have its own unique storage bin, so rather than continually opening more warehouses, Lego limits how many custom parts designers can introduce each year. 

“We can’t make everything decorated. We can’t change every brick into every color,” Scott says. “Otherwise the portfolio would just explode in complexity, so we have teams that manage the complexity level.” 

And those teams came up with one simple idea to stem the tide of complexity: “frames.” 

Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too. Every year, design leads like Scott are given a limited number of frames that they can spend on their entire portfolio for physical pieces that aren’t readily at hand. “If I have five products or 10 products coming out, I need to allocate where those frames go,” says Scott. 

https://www.theverge.com/c/23991049/lego-ideas-polaroid-onestep-behind-the-scenes-price