Just gonna rant for a while here.
>I recently decided to decorate a small section of wall with minifigs.
>It's about an 8X2 foot area so it is going to take me a while to
>collect the pieces. Especially since I want every piece to be
>unique. It comes to about 2000 of them. Have they even made
>that many?
>After buying about 20 sets I realized that there
>is no way I can aford to get all the minifigs I need for this project
>that way. I've checked ebay and bid on a bunch of lots but even that
>is going to take a while and quite a bit of money. I hit the
>garage sales every weekend for work and never see any Lego. Are there
>any other sources?
>One thing I've noticed when building the sets is that they have an
>insane amount of specialized parts. In one of the Harry Potter sets
>there was a 1X2 column that could have been built with 5 or 6
>1X2 bricks. There was an Alpha Team mecha set where the mecha foot
>could have been aproximated pretty closely with other bricks as well.
>In my day Lego were building toys not model kits. Granted there were
>pretty severe limits on what you could build. buildings were pretty
>much it and the roofs could only slope on one side, but you could
>build lots of different buildings.
>Of course the wheels are much better. The ones I had had a metal axle
>that stuck into the sides of special bricks.
>I've been to Toys R Us and Target and all they have are these scene >sets.
>Do they make more flexible sets?
Don't you just hate coming out of your Lego Dark Ages to find out they've completely changed the toy you used to love?
Welcome to Town Junior, which made its appearance about six years ago. This caused the birth of the acronym POOP: Pieces made Out of Other Pieces. Fortunately, there are still many non-Town junior sets.
Visit the lego website. There are still plently of sets that are indeed building sets. You just have to be an informed shopper. And look closely at the new Creator series.
As for the minifigs, I hope you have deep pockets. The average price of a minifig is about US$3. Unpopular (read very common) ones are cheap, US$1 or less. Rare minifigs (for example some of the female variety from the 1980s) can go for US$30 or more.
The best way to get a variety of minifigs quickly is the 9293 Community Workers set which has 30 minifigs and costs US$34.