Yeah, that really takes the fun out of Lego, which used to be a favourite toy of mine. I had a huge box of bits accumulated over the years.
Another toy we liked was making plastic Airfix airplane kits. They were pretty cheap, and when we got tired of admiring them my brother and I would tie them on strings and whirl them round our heads. When that got boring, we dowsed them with our dad`s lighter fuel, got them burning and then started whirling again; spectacular at night, though you had to watch out for flying gobs of burning plastic!