Comment by throwanem

I actually just gave away all my Lego to a colleague whose three sons are much better able to appreciate it than I am, and (because!) it's been quite a few years since I actually built anything.

But, that said, were I looking to buy parts, I'd hesitate to do so in bulk by these categories, unless the price were very good indeed - between the inability to match a parts list to a purchase order, and the extensive manual labor required to sort parts sold by mass at a useful degree of granularity, they'd need to be very cheap in order to make the purchase worth my while.

(On the other hand, most of my builds back in the day were spacecraft of various fictional types, and I heavily favored complexity, which means a large number of small parts, designing in wiring channels for LED lighting, and the like. I'm not sure how representative my comments here are of any other style.)