Doctor Roswell

Well, for one thing, a lot of that stuff is on sale right now. Once their subscription ends, it won't be.

Well, there's been an issue for a while (basically since Beast Mastery was released, although the problem has shown up across all mastermind primaries) where pets aren't taking commands properly, and are have been charging AVs as soon as they spawn in incarnate trials, no matter how far away they are or what orders they're issued. Passive/Follow? They'll still run clear across the map to get splattered by Siege or Marauder.

I've seen a lot of people who say they refuse to play their MM until that bug is fixed, and others who dismiss their pets at certain points on certain trials until the group is ready to rush in. I haven't heard of anyone flat-out avoiding MMs altogether, though.

I think a fourth of a cent each seems a little too cheap for what you get... maybe something more along the lines of 25 cents apiece?

Waitwaitwait... what's wrong with Claws stalkers? My Claws/Elec stalker just hit level 37 and I've loved every stabbity-death of it. Is this one of those "it's great, just not as great as some other sets" things like how every blast set that isn't Fire is "terrible?"

And in Batman & Robin (ugh)... the actor playing Batman didn't even get top billing. Nor did Robin, for that matter. Mr. Freeze did.

One example.

And another.

Rickman's performance was just as important as Willis's. The interaction between their characters was one of the primary things that set Die Hard apart from previous action movies and is one of the reasons it's still held up as the standard today. Two main characters, two integral performances, two stars.
No, I read it just fine. You're ignoring a whole lot of what I typed because it doesn't support what you want it to. Terminator? Lethal Weapon? Nightmare on Elm Street? Et cetera.
Does it matter?

Alan Rickman was at least as much the star of the first Die Hard as Bruce Willis was. Limiting "star" to only "single protagonist" doesn't work. Who was the star of the original Terminator? Who's the star of any given Nightmare on Elm Street movie? Who was the star of The Avengers? Pulp Fiction? Lethal Weapon? Se7en? Face/Off? Sleepless in Seattle? Remember, you only get one.

"Hans Gruber, charming international bandit. In the end, he dies hard. He's the title character." -- Barney Stinson

Unless we assume those astrals were earned on trials (which, I think, is not unreasonable). If even one of those trials was successful (as the vast majority are), then the character also has at least one piece of thread-based incarnate salvage already in their inventory -- a common even in a worst-case scenario. So we really only needed 40 threads, and can therefore save two of those astrals.

On top of that, some trial-based badges happen practically automatically (the one for not shutting off the turrets in a BAF, the one for a "dual assault" in a LAM), and others are fairly common even if you can't just assume them (not letting any prisoners escape in a BAF). The first time a character earns one of those, they get a free uncommon salvage piece -- again, thread-based. Even assuming the player isn't saving these for higher tiers and is simply downgrading them to specific commons to get whatever tier they're working on NAO, those uncommons can save us even more converted astrals, and might eliminate the need for threads (or shards, for that matter) altogether, at least for the first few incarnate powers created.

Also, even if we apply this 4-to-1 threads-to-shards ratio we get by comparing their respective "values" when trading in an astral, I don't know of anything in the game that drops 15 shards in your lap just for getting halfway through it -- but I do know of a place that hands out 60 threads.

Like the old "Parallel Illusion" SG!

The L/I naming trick and that phrase can get you 64 technically-unique names that all read exactly the same.

Plus they were all Illusion controllers purposely designed to look just like Phantom Army.

I think that's a problem inherent to the contact-mission setup as a whole, not to the TFs themselves. Aside from a few easy-to-miss speech bubbles inside the missions, all the information is conveyed via talking to the contact. Which only the team leader interacts with. And because they don't want to keep the team waiting while they read, most people skip past it as a courtesy to the rest of the group. Unless you're a roleplayer doing the entire TF in-character with other roleplayers, most of the TF's plot and setup simply aren't made available to most of the team.

More recently-introduced TFs like the revamped Positron and Penny help that a little with the introduction of the cutscenes that everyone gets to see. Even so, you spend most of the TF running around just doing what you're told by the game, then a cutscene comes up explaining that (*SPOILERS*) the city councilman you just rescued orchestrated a supervillain's escape from prison so she'd destroy Terra Volta and he could build a new, more efficient power plant in its place, but she threw him a curveball by getting her hands on a Council device that threatens the entire city and now she has to be stopped. And suddenly you're like, "oh, so that's what we've been doing for the last three-and-a-half missions."

You had me until this last part. I like the suggestion of adding a statue of Statesman to the city somewhere, I support the idea of it happening, I hope it eventually ends up making its way into the game. But I don't demand it be implemented, I don't insist it has to happen, and if it doesn't ever come to pass, that doesn't somehow prove anything with regards to some vendetta people assume the current dev team has against Jack Emmert. It's not my place to make those kinds of judgments. Putting the statue in would indeed be, to a point, a demonstration of "no hard feelings" toward Statesman. Not putting it in wouldn't be a demonstration of the opposite. It wouldn't be a demonstration of anything.

If we never get a Statesman statue, all that "shows" is that the dev team decided to put their time, effort and budget into... whatever it is we end up getting instead.