I played 40K i8n the early 90's and it was pretty expensive back then, but I recently walked into a GW store just to have a look for old times sake and nearly had a heart attack. IMO it all started to go wrong in 1993 when there was a management buyout and they started to aim their products at a younger audience*. The models these days look a bit OTT and cartoonish, some are quite cool though, I bought a squad of Dark Angels veterans to paint for a brief distraction.
That said, it's not the price that put me off, it was all the time you have to spend painting them. When you are 14 you suddenly realise that time spent inside painting little lumps of lead is time not spent with girls, and the less time spent with girls the less chance you have of getting into their knickers.
EDIT:
*Not to mention they've racked up the danger levels with each new race/edition so that now there are so many superawesomeunstoppableforcesofdoom bearing down on the human race that it's impossible to rack up the tension anymore...which is good in a way, because that is a pretty hackneyed way of getting people interested in your little story/universe etc and it gets pretty stale and offputting after a while. Unfortunately it seems that that is all GW are capable of doing, or perhaps that's the level of sophistication they think their customer base has (teenagers like GRIMDARK yeah?).
As already mentioned, it also means it's impossible to advance the 'story' anymore, but that's what you get when you start tacking bits of history and fluff to a fantasy setting, it wasn't really a story to begin with, but now people expect one, even though you've built up the setting to the point that advancing it's 'story' would mean trashing it (according to all the hype you've built up around the superawesomeunstoppableforcesofdoom bearing down on the human race).
