I have to say its sad to see these kinds of threads, since they are so common. The fact is, Games Workshop has always been very expensive, much too expensive for all the people who show interest. The sad thing is, it also is too cheap for people to "dabble" in it, or try getting used to it.
Here is my understanding of the trend of the hobby itself though, which also is annoying gamers.
The idea behind the old books was that there were a range of options that could be tested out, and that people would play for fun, and that while points limits would limit games in scale, people could obviously make accommodations so that the game was fair. People also could look around for units that they thought were better. This would make playing the game encourage spending, which wasn't always too difficult. If you really needed a predator tank, hey, you could wait three months, and have it for the next eight years.
Then, on top of this, there were a couple categories of lists that were socially monitored.
"Power lists" were what we called "competitive lists" today, lists that are finely tuned to maul someone.
"Cheese lists" were either gimmicks, or competitive lists that seemed to shaft a realistic vision of an army to abuse the force organization chart. A marine army with scouts and land raiders could be considered one of these. People shied away from these lists to encourage a more thematic setting.
"Normal lists" were lists that were not tuned as much as competitive lists, that most people used. People experimented with these lists, and had fun. I made these lists and for tournaments I made slightly competitive lists.
Once codex creep kicked in though, what happened is, people started to have worse match ups. While I didn't experience this much myself, the Grey Knight codex was obviously the easiest book to use and do well with. So few of their basic units can be outfitted in terrible ways, so if you take a Grey Knight player, and an Eldar player, who are both new, I bet on the Grey Knight player winning more games.
This in turn might discourage the Eldar player, either making him spend a lot of money, or leaving him in the dirt. Who knew that Grey Knights were amazing at killing Eldar Guardians? Who knew that Vypers weren't very powerful, and were overpriced? Not them of course.
I'm not trying to distract too much from the main topic. All I'm trying to say is that I think people should try actually doing something about these trends. Making a visible, tangible petition to change Games Workshop for the better. Even when I started, I always thought about how to make more models per boxed set, or how to convert things to save money, but its ridiculous if you can't even buy the conversion parts without looking at similarly priced items outside of this hobby.
This is why I haven't bought anything. I converted Obliterators for my 5th edition list, and use parts from my now obsolete Lost and the Damned army (which once was a tournament legal traitor/mutant list).
