Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25342943-20170419025039/@comment-26812877-20171009144309

Yeah, Ben spends almost an entire episode as Grey Matter...because he was tempering with the Omnitrix. He kept messing around with it and treating it like a toy. Even in later seasons we see him messing with the Omnitrix. As a result, the Omnitrix did end up being pretty inconsistent. That's fine because there's a valid reason as to why the Omnitrix was pretty inconsistent in the original show.

In the reboot however, Ben didn't mess with the Omnitrix as often and yet it still showed plenty of inconsistency. The Omnitrix even rebooted itself in one episode to fix the issues that Ben caused from tampering with it yet it's still pretty inconsistent.