I believe TLG only wants one thing: sustained profitability. Period. Full stop. No company of its kind wants anything else. So the question the Lego company is constantly facing is: how do we (1) keep demand for our products up and (2) sell them for as much as we can? 1) They want people to be scrambling to acquire the sets they produce; they want people thinking "I'd better buy this right now because who knows when it will be retired and gone forever!" That is a very good mentality for Lego's customers to have. Lego's customers will take a much different approach to buying if they know they can get this same set in a few years for the same price. 2) And let's talk about price: Lego is VERY expensive! Almost outrageously expensive. Seriously. $200 for a spaceship made out of little bricks with a Star Wars logo on it? That's not cheap. But a huge reason why people are willing to spend $150, $200 or even $400 for a box of plastic bricks is because consumers believe in their value. Consumers believe these sets will always be worth what they paid for them, and will maybe even appreciate. Consumers trust in Lego because they are well made, last forever, and retain value. So the $200 price tag is softened quite a bit when you know it will always be worth this amount, even after you open and play with it. Compare this to my other hobby: my wine cellar. I often compare the two in my mind, and I think the comparison is worth pointing out here. Wine is consumable. The moment I pop the cork on a $400 bottle of Bond or Schrader or whatever, that "asset" just became worth nothing except the pleasure I'm about to experience as I drink it. Tomorrow morning I'm going to pee it all out and recycle the empty bottle. And my $400 Death Star? I can open it up and build it with my son. And then display it for a year while he plays with it. Then tear it apart and build a new scene with some of the pieces and minifigures and toss the bulk in a storage bin. Then we can find all the pieces again and build it all over in five years. And then get tired of it and put it all back in the original box with the instructions and sell it used and complete on eBay for $700. It sure makes it a lot easier for me to spend $400 on a Lego set than a bottle of cabernet once I go through all of this in my head... To sum up, I think TLG wants to retire sets, loves seeing prices skyrocket in the secondary market, and will not do anything that is going to screw up its own sustainable profitability. What TLG has done over the past 10 years has seen the company rise from the ashes to become this massive leviathan of money-making. If they started re-releasing numerous old sets or making their products available forever (i.e. stopped retiring them after 2-4 years) then the consumers' mindsets would really change. And profits would go down. And that isn't going to happen.