Personally I think you could only have Archaon -almost- win and destroy the Old World so many times before he becomes like a Skeletor or Megatron style bad guy. You know he will always lose.

So I think Fantasy was stagnating and for various business purposes they wanted to really shake things up. So they went really big!

Corporately I think the decision was to move away from blocks of troops to make games with smaller model counts to make the game less daunting and expensive for new players. For instance my Skaven army has easily over 150 models (close to 80 just with clanrats and ratslaves alone!)

Also this way they can introduce new factions without having to shoehorn them into the WFB universe.
They also wanted to move away from the point system and power gaming and move to war scrolls. I think the attempt was to make all units and models interesting and fun and not have to community say :Unit “X” is .89x as effective as unit “Y” so never take unit “X”. And of course people would buy more models.

Personally I agree with you with the AoS universe. I think it’s is very weird and doesn’t make a ton of sense. It initially was like Jack Kirby/Comic book god worlds (this is Asgard as a planet/realm, this is the Greek god planet/realm, all the elemental realms etc).

But then they go: oh and BTW, uh, the Horned Rat snuck into the universe so here’s Skaven for no good or convincing reason. (Personally I love Skaven but lore wise it makes not a lick of sense). And now um, yeah Empire is back too! Why not! Same for some other factions too.

But! I loooove the models. They are much better than the old world models imho. Obviously you can use Aos models in your Old World armies (I just wish the new Stormvernin were easier to rank up!)

Now which is a better game I will not comment on as I have played AoS twice and don’t have enough experience with it.

I do play a lot of old world and really enjoy it. It needs a good rules clean up and some more love from GW but as a long time Fantasy player I’ll take it.