Speaking as a parent, Lego is a terrible toy. Legos are only available in build-one-thing sets now - 100+ tiny pieces which build one thing, and if you lose a piece, you can't build that one thing any more, and the pieces aren't suited to building anything else. Plus the resulting toys are terrible - you can't play with them, they fall apart! I suppose I could glue every piece together, but that seems tedious. It makes for very profitable presents-from-grandma, but it's a crappy toy. I've embargoed Legos in my house.
Speaking as a marketer, HN should understand that this is a piece of viral marketing from Lego. It was created by an ad agency, not by good customer service.
As a parent of 3 kids who have more lego than they know what to do with, I disagree. They've got a ton of lego city stuff, a few technics, and a couple of the character/themed ones. That's enough to cover the living room floor about an inch deep, with a few spare pieces to hide near their beds for me to step on at night.
There are special parts, not that many of them really. A lot of them can be worked around with a little builder's ingenuity. The special parts that are the most annoying are the ones where we have one or two, they're small, and they're somewhere. Not where we're looking, or where we've been looking for the last half hour.
My kids build the kit design once. Then the pieces go into the bins. They'll build it again, in motley color schemes, with adaptations. They'll build boats, cars, towers, trucks, and spaceships. And some things that I can't name, but they can tell you exactly what each piece is for.
And in the last year or so, they've started downloading the instructions for sets that they don't have from the lego site, going through them and figuring out what pieces they don't have and need to work around, and deciding if they can build those items. (This is a 5 and an 8 yr old). At 5, the kid is looking through a set of instructions, identifying pieces, remembering if there is one of them in the thousands of pieces we have, and deciding if it's something that can be worked around. That's pretty good training for engineering.
When I was a kid (and that was during the horrible late nineties and early 2000s, when Lego was all about cramming as many special pieces into their sets as possible – a trend that has reversed by now) I of course needed generic bricks, but even the horrible sets of that time provided them in large enough numbers. What I also loved was repurposing special parts in novel ways. That was always possible, with every part.
My multifunctional super-car obviously needed all the special computer bricks I could get my hands on!
The only thing I never liked where bricks with stickers. Luckily those were and still are rare.
When I was a kid (many years ago) Lego, surprise surprise, also came in kits usually to build one and only one thing. I'd always build that thing once, maybe twice, and then all those pieces went into the bigger pile. The kits always had the best pieces; it's actually harder, in my opinion, to build cool stuff if you have nothing but regular old bricks.
I didn't realize you couldn't reuse the Legos from the specialized kits. I better go tell my kids who have built all kinds of crazy contraptions over the years. Frankly, I think having a bin full of parts that used to be a few different kits makes for a lot more creativity than having a bin full of standard Legos. There are so many more options.
Repurposing special kit parts for your own builds is one of the best parts of Legos.
It's an early age manifestation of the hacker ethos - taking some thing and finding all the ways you can use it outside of its original intent, and then putting those disparate things together to build something entirely new.
Those are cherrypicked examples. 15 years ago they still had the custom horse, dragon, stone wall, etc pieces and today they still have sets of just plain pieces.
Back in '82 there weren't as many different themes (afaik there were maybe 4: space, town, castle and trains), but the concept definitely existed.
Some might even argue about the gender-neutrality of those themes too: the majority of Lego I owned around that time was the space-themed stuff, and my sister had some of the town sets. In fact, as long ago as 1979 Lego brought out a range called Scala [1] that was targeted almost exclusively at girls (my wife has really fond memories of those sets!)
While I can see how LEGO sets have indeed become less imaginative in the box (all these sets that are specific for one use) unlike the creativity that was required when I was a child playing with LEGOs, that does not change the fact that you can use all the pieces in creative ways. Instead of embargoing LEGOs, maybe you should use them to teach your children to be creative in coming up with new ideas. (This is not meant as a commentary at your parenting skills - while typing this I can already see it as potentially coming across like that since I can't convey the proper emotion with text on a screen - just offering it as an alternate viewpoint).
LEGOs gave me the power to use my imagination and creativity to build what I wanted, and this empowered me as a child, and honestly I believe that it also gave me the analytical mindset that has translated over to my programming career.
The Lego creator sets are built with the generic bricks and and they reintroduced the City line which also uses far fewer specialized bricks than the licensed sets. The big tub'o'bricks are still on sale as well.
The 'genius' of Lego is that the pieces from one 'build one thing' set work with the pieces from other 'build one thing' sets. I had a ton of those as a kid and they all ended up just being source material for whatever I was building. As a kid, whenever I saw new sets the things I was most interested in were all of the new custom pieces. "Wow! That set comes with a shark!" instead of "Look I can build some underwater vehicle!" I don't think that I ever rebuilt any of my sets after they were deconstructed back into 'source material.'
I don't know if you have a Lego Store near you, but you can walk into a Lego store and buy generic Lego bricks in every color. They also have a great website that lets you order 1 of any specialized brick they make or the generic bricks in bulk for pennies each.
Not sure what the problem with that is. And as others have said, after a week all those legos just go into one pot anyways and mix together to make anything.
The simplest solution then is to avoid the fancy "sets" and just buy the Lego generic collections. For example, this is what I got for my desk at work - http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-More-Builders-Tomorrow/dp/... granted I wish they had included fewer small pieces, but it has no specialty parts so your limit is just your imagination.
Speaking as a marketer, HN should understand that this is a piece of viral marketing from Lego. It was created by an ad agency, not by good customer service.