and a detour, Cracked on 5 reasons Megatron should have fired Starscream

http://www.cracked.com/article_16954_5-reasons-megatron-should-have-fired-starscream-years-ago.html

G1 was simply not that good a cartoon if you can watch it without being blinkered by a mixture of childhood nostalgia and heavy doses of the sunk-cost fallacy for your creative and emotional investment. Which is not to say certain funny tropes developed from the show or that no versions of Transformers have been interesting.  But all that would warrant more words of discussion than I consider necessary.  Instead let's refer to TV Tropes on The Starscream. I would not endorse wiki-anything for a resource on something actually important like politics, religion, serious art or literature or the sciences ... but for Transformers lore or pop culture ... it's the age of the geek, baby (and there's a pop culture reference thrown in there, too, for that matter).

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStarscream