Name one reason this shouldn't have been more popular than the garbage that GW put out

It's not monetized. You can play it with cardboard cutouts and a google image of downtown New Jersey.
Also modern game design has moved away from customization and towards features. Instead of different robot parts, you get robot spells, that allow you to introduce a new rule. Think of 80s-90s game design as a lego set, and of modern game design as a waifu figure which can be "upgraded" with a school uniform or cat ears. Take a guess which approach get you more money.

Horrible aged designs of the mechs. By today's standards, you would need to completely overhaul the art direction of all mechs. just doesn't do it anymore.

Art isn't as good
Books are not laid out in an easy to understand manner
No fantasy elements
Models used to be more expensive, now about the same

As a fan of battletech I don't disagree, a lot of the mech designs are downright atrocious and even the good designs are plagued with being represented by terrible art.

And the worst part is the community will flip their collective shit if you try to redesign anything in even the subtlest of ways to make them look less absolutely fucking awful.

>No fantasy elements
You say that like this isn't a point in its favor.

Marketing

It's an anime from the time when most popular and good anime was copying cult western movie/book SCI-FI classics.
Meanwhile, GW cuts to the chase goes for said movie/book classics.

>Alas, complicated things have a barrier to entry
>a hobby that clearly doesn't lend itself to simpletons
I mean, you say this with the typical sort of sneering elitism, but having discovered Battletech via Megamek and quite enjoyed it I still have no idea how the fuck you're supposed to actually play this game on a real table without spending hours pouring over about three or four different manuals all the time to reference rules. That's not fun, it's tedious. With a computer handling all the heavy lifting of being referee and rules checking it's fine.

Updates have been occurring thanks to the game side of things proving the franchise is still profitable.

Between Canadian shovelware developers who'd rather be playing EVE, bootleg Russian miniatures based on their work, and HBS also piling on, Battletech is making a comeback of all things.

>it's an anime
It's based out of things like Sun Dougram, yes, but I'm confused by your wording here.

It's an 80s robot anime setting through and through. The licensed (and not, with Mosapeda stuff) designs are just a cherry on top.

Personally I can't fucking wait for the HBS game. Of anyone they're the most likely to make a halfway decent quality game that stays true to the franchise.

I just fear they'll fuck up the animations.

The demo shown completely skipped all of them and pasted a big WIP over them.
Except the animations are one of the biggest things they need to actually create from scratch.

>Except the animations are one of the biggest things they need to actually create from scratch.
That's probably why they had nothing to show yet. Gamers are stupid, showing bad, incomplete animations would have been met with people ranting and raving over how shitty the animations are no matter how many times you tell them it's just a demo and it's still in progress, but then having none at all with a big "WIP" leaves no question that the animations are still in progress.

1. Games Workshop has much better miniatures
2. GW has much better supporting media, like novels (although BattleTech got games right long before GW, GW has caught up now)
3. warhammer has multiple unique factions. BattleTech basically just has two - Inner Sphere and Clan - that come in various flavours.
4. The aesthetic in BattleTech hasn't been updated as well, leaving it with a 1980s vibe. Although as points out, MWO has been making some pretty big improvements to the classic mech designs.

Warhammer was better.

And I say this as someone who posts at least 10 times a day in /btg/

>GW Novels
>Good

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaha

>he hasn't read the battletech trash

There's maybe a half dozen passable ones.

And there are exactly as many passable warhammer ones, so your point is moot.

They haven't updated the rules away from 80s hex/chit wargaem style.
The lore is mostly boring af history lessons with limited appeal.
The community is awful, even for gamers.
The porch incident.
The aesthetics mostly suck outside the iconic designs.
Army building, list play, etc. are a clusterfuck.

take your pick really

They did put out the Alpha Strike rules to do away with the hex grid, but otherwise you're spot on.

>The porch incident.
The what?

Loren Coleman spent a large portion of CGL's money on a remodel for his house's porch, which nearly killed the company. This is extremely simplified, by the way.

Alpha Strike exists, but it was received only a little better than Age of Sigmar.
The lore appeal is subjective.
The community is no different than any other wargame community.
The porch incident hit Shadowrun and everything else CGL was working on at the time.
Yeah, the aesthetics are pretty wonky.
There are multiple levels to army building, but at the most simple, it's "pick a handful of units that add up to within 30/50 of X points". If you're making custom units, then yeah, it's much more complicated.