I agree that W:AoS seems to be doing well to a degree.
I won't say that the "high" fantasy stuff of W:AoS isn't an effort to create, although with "low" fantasy one really does need to be very creative with their effort to keep it going and not get lazy. Like Padre's effort with his Tilean campaign, and this is just coming from one person, when GW could have chosen to get behind really doing something favorable for the Olde World. Instead GW crushed the Olde World to find a way to make fantasy profitable quickly. That cost them a backlash, that they still haven't recovered from it with old time fans (not that such is their interest), yet could if they are creative with the rumored return to the Olde World. I frankly don't buy any of their newer stuff, the stormcrud eternals are horrible models from my perspective, and they've done nothing to move the human factions forward with any credibility either. There's that new undead force that look like pre-Necronos, and the newest elves seems a tragic direction to take them, yet maybe that is their point. I really think this W:AoS was a way for them to create a bridge to the world of 40K, especially now that I hear the current time frame of W:AoS is supoosably 10,000 years in the future from the Olde World. That's just not where I want to go with my fantasy collection, so no more money spent in that direction, alhtough I'm sure just being one little dude in the wide world of miniature gaming just isn't that important to them.
I did stop the other day and wonder how SteveB might have handled all this W:AoS stuff, yet he was alive during when it started, and I don't recall seeing any of the new stuff in his collection, so that leads me to believe that despite is vast and creative imagination he wasn't interested in walking down the distraction that something like W:AoS might be considered by some hobbiests, and so in that light, I do feel as if my view isn't all by itself. And then when I see Padre keep going with his world, that is just more credibility for me to keep going with mine.