It really is all @Craig Martyn 's fault 
and teaching his fancy pants marketing to the model rail world...
Truth. It's all about the buzz.
I've also observed previously that the mfrs. do this to us and then lurk in threads like this to gauge demand for future development opportunities. IMO - and you guys at ScaleTrains.com should note - that we have tired of being repeatedly "poked" this way. Enough already. The value of these threads as inputs is no longer there because we mostly just ignore them.
It was a year ago last January I compiled an
informal survey over era preference, and "modern" was way down the scale, at 17%. Less than one in five. So why is it that so much new tooling is modern era? My gawd, the existing 2nd-generation models' tooling is long-in-the-tooth, especially representations of hood width. So what's the problem with tooling a new motor so we can get near-scale
proportions in new/revised shell tooling?
The mind boggles. Hey,
@scaletrains - port that SD45 to N. Kato's is 1980s tech, Bachmann's is... well, Bachmann. Ugh.
