No matter how good a figure is, it will never take off well unless it has supporting products.

You could make the most realistic figure, with great bending, and easy to pose, that renders like a dream. But unless you have a ready made catalog for it when it is released, people will not have any use for it.

I have been through several new base figure releases in my time as a product maker, and it takes about a year for the market to start to really adopt the new figure as something worthwhile for their runtimes. So that means for that first year, not many product makers are going to take that gamble on slow sales....and as such, there will not be many new products for that figure.

Without the new products for the figure, the interest in that figure dies away. That is the cycle of death for new figures. We have seen that with several "new" poser figures in recent history.  It is not because the figure was all that bad (well..ok..some were LOL). But nobody wants a figure that only has 2 dresses, and a half dozen skins. It is really not that usable.

What saved DAZ and allowed them to keep sales strong with their genesis line is that they were able to make it so that much of the previous generation stuff still worked "decently" (not perfectly...but decently) on the new generations. So there really was no time where the figures could not be dressed and posed and look fresh in a scene.

Independent figures do not have that luxury.

HW made a sincere attempt with Dawn to have a number of product makers attempt to back her with products, that is why she has done better than a number of new figures......but in the end, she just didn't hold up to popularity like the daz figures, and the market returns were pretty low (speaking of my personal experience that is...and is not meant as a reflection on her market sales as a whole)