I definitely don’t think AoS is a loss-maker at this point, I’m just not convinced it’s making more than Fantasy was. I feel like AoS was mostly put forward with the intention to try things out for 40k, and the fact that it’s become established is more of a bonus.
I just don’t see enough different about it to be convinced that it was this drastic rebranding that ‘saved the game’ or what-not. Outside of the fluff, it just wasn’t a radical enough departure from Fantasy that I can see it completely turning things around.

Of course there are going to be people who joined in AoS, but there are also lots of people who left, and there are people like myself, who have tentatively returned to the fold as AoS has become more fleshed-out, and pick up a few kits here and there.

The degree to which AoS doesn’t scale down is what surprises me the most. I was expecting it to be a fleshed out skirmish game. Instead it’s basically 40k.
It’s absolutely true that a tiny game of Fantasy doesn’t work very well, because the units are arranged in blocks and operate as an actual army. The rules for AoS support tiny games just fine.

However, so many units require large mobs to be viable. I wanted to get a Beastman army started recently, but ungors or even gors aren’t really useful in mobs smaller than 30, so the model count and cost stack up really quickly. And individual models are very ‘boring’, compared to a model in Warmachine or Malifaux, for example, so smaller AoS games tend to just involve a few random dice rolls in the center of the table, as you roll to hit, wound, and save. They can’t really do any cool things, unless there are huge units and lots of different support pieces.

I think something like Blackstone Fortress is the solution to what people predicted AoS would be, and I think it’s GW’s best product in years, personally.