MMP is publishing quite a few games, not only ASL. For them it's clearly a labor of love, and I can imagine the profit margin to be small. I applaud their effort and continued motivation to publish games, and being an avid ASLer myself, am sincerely grateful. So I believe that the OP is not correct that energy and enthusiasm are missing, quite on the contrary.
However there's certainly also a grain of truth here, and I agree that marketing efforts could be much improved. While most ASLers that are in the hobby for a bit glean their info from well hidden FB comments and the like, so are generally well informed, people new to the hobby must find it very hard to find information about publishing schedules, current projects and so on. And yes, the website adds insult to injury. There's no other reason to have a News section which does not contain news than to make people wonder about the seriousness of your endeavour. It is very obvious that there is no marketing strategy in place, and despite everybody's best effort, the effect is negative. I posted on BGG a couple of days ago about Front Towards Enemy and later deleted that post because it felt too negative. But there's absolutely no information on BGG about this game, so why would people consider pre-ordering it? Isn't it disrespectful towards your designers if as a publisher you not drum up support for their efforts? I believe that an investment into a coherent and up to date marketing strategy would allow MMP to boost their sales significantly. As the OP mentioned, GMT is a good example. They managed to crowd source their marketing, aligning their designers via the Inside GMT blog, and post a monthly newsletter with a lot of info. All this drums up so much support for their games and helps sell them.
One should consider the sorely missing updated rulebook with incorporated errata. Taking an example from the RPG community, Goodman Games republishes their Dungeon Crawl Classic regularly via Kickstarter and rakes in $200k+:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1409961192/dcc-rpg-4th-printing
It contains some corrections and gets a different color and print options, but it's basically the same thing. So people collect them! I'm pretty sure most ASLers would sell their own grandmother to get their hands on a deluxe leather bound rulebook in a large font (with incorporated errata), or would buy a "regular" one every year as long as it contains some updates. So call up that guy that makes great WW2 paintings, align your printing technology, convert the rules to something easily editable and viable for cross-media publishing and off you go. Then maybe you'll also find it in yourself to make a serious effort to update the ill-written rule sections, write some nice introductions for the chapters, explaining how rules are laid out, provide more examples of play and so on.
Consider the eASLRB, which we all use, but hasn't been monetized in about ten years. That's like at least a million bucks missing right there. I've been consulting on various electronic and physical publishing and printing projects for years and offered a hand here for free, but never even got an answer. So I guess it really is a problem of priorities. Again I can see how proper business planning is directly opposed to having fun creating the game. I'm not saying, that this is necessarily bad. It's only bad if you can't make a living of it but have to, and then have to get a second job, which leaves less time for my hobby! And of course it's bad for people who would really like to buy a module, but can't, because it's out of print.
The boardgame industry is booming and there's a lot of change. If you look closely, you'll notice that Publishers have migrated to a very different business model nowadays. Stores and Resellers like games that come in little chunks, like LCGs and CCGs, where they can pack a lot on one shelf, and get customers coming back regularly to get the new pack. ASL is perfectly suited for this. Instead of publishing a Journal with scenarios, put the scenarios only in Action Packs, add a counter sheet and sell a couple of thousand for fifty bucks. Instead of delaying the french module because the HASL is not ready, publish them separately. Retailers will love it, customers will love it, it's a win win. Instead of producing boxes, produce a storage system that you can sell as well, but as a different product. Key terms here are small, ongoing and on a regular basis.
I really feel that ASL is stuck, just look at the scenario cards. Do players really want a letter sized scenario card? We all love the historical background. So why not publish three or four engagements from the same battle, research the background and publish as a booklet, give the players two small cards with their OOBs that they can sleeve? Add a counter sheet. Sell for 50 bucks. Offer a download for $45 with a VASL map. Possibilities are endless, if you're just willing to think a little bit outside the box.
Of course all this requires you to have a well managed supply chain. If you need to print thousands of copies to make it viable, maybe you're not doing it right. Maybe you should fly to China and have some talks with suppliers over there. Maybe you need to buy your own printing press to make it work. I'm sure there's a solution. One solution, a very low hanging fruit, could be to actually make your webshop work so that people like me can place an order. It's broken today, and I have communicated this for years now: no response (you can't order if your shipping and billing addresses are in different countries). The weakest link will determine the strength of your chain. If you can't manage a webshop yourself, rent it. If you can't make pre-ordering work, use Kickstarter. If you can't produce counters, buy CH. Yeah, I said that.
And last but not least, I find it not very smart to have no pre-order in place for all the modules that have gone out of print and could be easily reprinted. It would just be a matter of telling your printer to print, and you would have the money on hand due to people signing up, and you wouldn't need a lot of storage space because you would just send out most of the run, and you wouldn't be under any pressure until the preorder number is reached - so at least from my perspective, it doesn't make sense.
So yes, if you add this up, despite all the great work being done, in my opinion, the Dodo question is not entirely unwarranted. Anyway, just my 2 cents, it's not my company and I actually couldn't care less if it weren't my hobby. I just have a point of view from over here.
