well, mainly i'm just not interested in investing into minis for game purposes. someone above said they blew 400 dollars on minis, and i'm willing to bet that he's met plenty of people who have spent way more on it.
that being said, i would consider buying minis given a few assumptions:
1) i want to know what it is that i'm buying. if i decide i want to invest in hellhounds, i don't want to end up with a dryad... i want a fragging hellhound.
2) it would have to be pre-painted. i lack the skill, and the patience, and the interest, to paint minis.
3) it would have to be pretty cheap.
so, those being said, basically here's about the closest thing i could see myself coming to spending money on a miniatures based game: they would have to be cardstock (or possibly even plastic, i suppose) cutouts. possibly with two different facings on them, and a plastic base would go well with that.
at that point, i would consider buying the game. it would certainly eliminate the "i got a better army because of luck, therefore i win" problem, and would certainly help with the "i have more money to buy enough packs that i got what i wanted, therefore i win" problem as well. of course, the drawback to this is that it likely would not make as much money, and therefore they would have to sell even more of them.
in any event, it might even look kinda cool... for example, to see what can be done with paper minis:
http://melkot.com/mechanics/sj-ships.html.
now of course, those are ships for spelljammer, not people... but the point is, you can get some pretty nice looking 'figures' out of it, they give you a good feel for what the object looks like, and they are cheap. and require minimal skill to assemble.
plus, it could be available in .PDF format, which seems about where the system is going. (of course, if you plan to make the majority of your money on selling the minis, you'd probably have to go with the more expensive plastic cutouts... but if you're just interested in selling the sourcebooks, that's the best method for minis imo).