Kyle Davis@Chigaze @AmeliasBrain @megmac very true. The kits are just so much more marketable and marketed.
To put it another way: A bucket of bricks is something you buy for yourself, a kit is something someone buys for you.
Meg@linux_mclinuxface @Chigaze @AmeliasBrain I definitely mostly got kits when I was a kid but to be honest Lego wasn't my biggest "building block toy." I was actually way more into Construx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construx), and a lot more of my freestyle building was with those (though they were also kits). It kinda seems like, even aside from the bigger emphasis on branded stuff, there's also a big loss of variety of this kind of alternative building toy.
Either way when I was a kid I don't think most of the kits were branded ones. They were mostly just generic space ships and castles and towns. I kinda wonder if that also still felt more freeform-able since "Lego Millennium Falcon" feels a lot more shelf worthy than "Lego Space Ship no.204".
@megmac @Chigaze @AmeliasBrain oh man, I had some construx but were definitely a lego family. I recall building rather gigantic swords with construx. We’d fight with them and they fall to bits in a satisfying crunch upon impact.
We also had quite a few Capsela as well but I understand that was rather obscure.
@linux_mclinuxface @Chigaze @AmeliasBrain definitely one of the best things about construx was how you could build really big, but fairly stable, things. I mostly made space ships lol.