Okay, so I'm watching Beast Machines when I have some spare time. So far it's been a rather interesting ride with horrible, horrible character designs. The only thing actually holding it together is the voice acting. 

I'm up to part 4-5 and I have some questions. Is there an explanation why the crew reverted back to their original BW forms instead of the Transmetals, or just a case of recognizability? They reuse the later models at some flashback scenes so they can't have been completely gone.

Also, is there anyone as interesting as Dinobot, Airazor, Inferno or Silverbolt later on? Right now it's just the characters I never really liked, racing around. Jetstorm is proving rather interesting though.

Well, there is an explanation for it, albeit a weak one. The story says that Megatron wanted to "devolve" the Maximals or something, and the four surviving Maximals survived because they had already gone through multiple forms - the de-evolution gas wasn't able to bring them further back than their original forms thanks to the extra "layers" in the form of the Transmetal forms. This sounds forced and silly (and completely unnecessary as the Maximals were soon reformatted by the Oracle anyway), but it does explain the disappearance of both Rhinox and Silverbolt, who were both only on their first form.

Unfortunately not, at least not on the Maximal side. It is the Vehicons that get to shine a bit more in this series.

Well, I'm through Revelations, and I got some explanations. Still, the cast is not very interesting and having the same three Vehicons doing their stuff over and over gets old. Hey look, now Jetstorm is attacking. Hey look, here comes Thrust. Hey look, there's Tankor too. Defeat and repeat.

And what happened to selling toys? There is ONE new character introduced within the nine episodes I've seen so far.

3D animation was a pretty new thing back in the nineties. It wasn't that quick and easy to create character models as it might be nowadays.

I just rewatched this show on DVD and my opinions hasn't changed.
To me Beast Machines is a pretty controversial series, the way they contradicts some things established in Beast Wars and the entire Transformers mythos really bothers me. Saying Cybertron was once an organic planet... which it wasn't before, and that the beast wars was about regaining their natural instincts (or something) seems like they just made that up for this series. As I rewatched this show, there were moments where I wished I was watching Beast Wars instead.

You might say it's like Shoji Kawamori came in and directed this show (as seen in his shows ¨Arjuna¨, ¨Macross Zero¨ and ¨Aquarion¨ where they make such fuzz about how important nature is).

I will say this: On it's own it's descent, but as a sequel to Beast Wars or as a Transformers series it feels so distant. So for me, the Generation 1 timeline ends at the very last episode of Beast Wars.