Well, it's easy for me, I always was out of the fandom as I was the only Transformers fan in my provincial city

the local hobby/geek shop had some figures every now and then, but I'm the only one who was buying them, other shoppers concentrated on fantasy, anime or superhero stuff.
But since then, they stopped selling Transformers merch and concentrated on tabletop games such as WH40K, and I started buying online; which is both a blessing and a curse, because on one hand, you can get EVERYTHING delivered to your doorstep, but on the other hand, when you've been working for 48 hours on a market analysis of
these houses in Athens or something similar, it's easy to overspend on merch as a way to "have fun" in the middle of a short pause
Still, I'm glad I've found this forum, as I've finally got someone to talk to. I just hope that I won't shock anyone when talking about the movies, because I didn't have any hardcore fan to discuss them and I don't know which ones are respected and which ones are hated in the community...