After helping my 4 year old build dozens of kits over the past year or two I've noticed many patterns of use with those 'specialized' pieces. They're absolutely

After helping my 4 year old build dozens of kits over the past year or two I've noticed many patterns of use with those 'specialized' pieces. They're absolutely reusable, to the degree that by looking at a box I can pretty much know that it's going to have a couple of [whatever] because it has arm or leg joints, a turret, etc. What I have seen is that the parts that come with typical kits are WAY more advanced than the race cars, castles and pirate ships I used to have. I'd say a good percentage of the bricks used to be bricks I'd only see in the advanced Technic kits from back in my day. I will say though that I went and bought a bucket of generic bricks because a lot of the bricks that come with the standard kits today aren't super awesome for a four year old that wants to build simple buildings and stuff like that.