As I'm sure you know, there are two incentives for inflating piece counts. First, many people consider the number of pieces in the set a metric for its "size,"

As I'm sure you know, there are two incentives for inflating piece counts. First, many people consider the number of pieces in the set a metric for its "size," and to them, "bigger is better." So you get sets with over 5,000 pieces that could have been constructed with fewer, larger pieces, but the people buying the set actually feel some satisfaction from the piece count, so... win-win? Secondly, many reviews of lego sets trot out a "price per piece" number as if you're buying pieces in bulk and get an instruction manual for assembling a set as a bonus. Smaller pieces make the set seem less expensive by that metric. I dunno how to fix that problem. We'd need to find a better metric (price per stud? price per gram?) and somehow get everyone to start using that metric in their reviews. For me personally, I find the whole exercise meditative, so if the set has several small pieces that could be one larger piece, that means I spend more time building the set, and at the end of the day, that's the experience I'm paying for. My question would be whether they find a way to make the construction interesting, or in reverse, whether it is repetitive enough to be relaxing. There are a lot of subjectives around that. My son built the Saturn V and loved every moment of it. If you didn't love working with small pieces that could have been replaced with larger bricks... I 100% accept that it was not an ideal experience for you. The pleasure of the build is subjective in many ways, we just have general heuristics to go by.