That's certainly a creative reading, since what I get from that is "so stupid/apathetic he would be completely ineffective." He's not 'afraid' of being purposeless. He's just not very good at staying on task without constant supervision. Very similar to Bruticus' "Liable to stand around in the middle of a battle if not told what to do."
If Skywarp isn't constantly told what to do and given tasks, he's liable to goof off or forget what he's supposed to be doing and instead cause random terror. Which is usually fine for a Decepticon, but every so often you need a guy to do something specific. If Megatron says, "Guard this doorway," Skywarp will guard it...for about an hour, and then he'll get bored and try to leave. If Megatron doesn't constantly call him up and say, "HEY SKYWARP ARE YOU STILL GUARDING THAT DOORWAY LIKE I TOLD YOU TO DUMB FUCKER?" then he'll forget he has to guard the doorway.
Gomess wrote:And yep, ok, that Marvel-aligned bio seems pretty inline with IDW's characterisation, though it'd benefit from using the word HONOUR. Good for them! But it's still not the tech spec and cartoon I grew up with. So, you can perhaps see where I'm coming from.
McCarthy's whole thing was looking at the techspecs and going, "Yep, this is what this guy was supposed to act like." Take Soundwave, for instance, who in AHM is exactly the conniving, backstabbing kind of guy his techspecs described. When Starscream and the Constructicons show up to stage their coup, Megatron basically goes, "Yeah, I already know. Soundwave told me."
The cartoon had a habit of taking the tech specs and occasionally ignoring them entirely, like Frenzy, for example, who just becomes Rumble In Red. Also, the TFU profiles were what Budiansky originally wrote as long-form bios for all the characters that were later shortened for the box tech specs. Thundy's box tech specs (here:
http://www.ntfa.net/ntfa/techspecs/inde ... dercracker) are word-for-word from that, just condensed and missing information. (For example, the techspec makes no mention of innocent human lives.)