Does Lego Purposely Increase Piece Count?

[Dennimator]

Noooo! Don't say that! I love the Creator sets and I like them just the way they are. I also disagree that the main purpose of small pieces is as decoration. For example, when building in Technic, small parts are needed to get the right gear spacing. SNOT work as well needs loads of small pieces.

As does 5-wide cars, and greebling. A big for small pieces!

[Sumendar]

But I like the Creator sets too... It's just that I don't like the 1x1s flatties. You cannot use them to connect much together.

Anyway I made this remark here because I was thinking that in some Creator sets those 1x1s significanly increase the piece count and might give a misleading low price-per-piece.

You mean 1x1 tiles with the flatties? Aside from being an irreplaceable part (there's no other odd-length tile around), only the houses have a large proportion (up to 7-8%) of the piececount in 1x1 tiles, and in those the piece is used for, well, tiling. Sure, if you also include 1x2 tiles and 1x1 or 1x2 plates, there's a lot, but I don't know if that's any different from technic sets where every pin, bush and 2-axle counts (up to 30+% of pieces) or system sets with tons of small bricks. The grand majority of my parts comes from large mixed lots, and checking my inventory, my most numerous part after the usual suspect (technic friction pin), is actually the 1x2 brick at about 1000 copies in 27k parts.

Looking past just the piececount (I usually check the inventory before buying), in my opinion those creator houses are good value for the money, both as original sets and also for MOCing (houses, naturally). Funnily, for MOCing purposes their only downside compared to the modulars is the relative lack of tiles...

[Rick]

Aside from being an irreplaceable part (there's no other odd-length tile around)

There's a 1 x 3 tile introduced in 2010.

But agreed: small bricks, plates, and tiles are essential, and indeed, they're slowly finding their way back into sets.