[roryisok]

Growing up, myself and my siblings built sets when we first got them as gifts, but after that they went in the pile. We would build whatever was in our imagination, from the multicolored heap.

Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)

It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.