thomas and friends mini series

Does Thomas always have to go first on the blind bag?

No! And as you can see from my checklist web page Thomas wasn't the first blind bag in North America for 2016 Wave 2! The four 2015 waves (excepting the DC Super Friends and Spencer and Edward apparently getting swapped in wave 4) showed evidence of very clear planning (e.g. always in the same order: Thomas, Percy, James, Gordon, Edward, Salty, ...) throughout. If you make that list of engines and then assign their 3-pack numbers to them, you can also see evidence that someone was very precise in creating the Minis. I made this chart quite a while ago:



The 2016 waves don't follow that order at all, there have been a couple errors in the included checklists in the later waves and at least one person on this forum has remarked that the 2016 paint jobs are of a lower quality, all of which makes me think that someone else (we'll say, "less detail-oriented") has been responsible for the later Minis.