They are obviously making money or they wouldn't still be producing sceneries. So tell me, if you are a business and your goal is to make money, how is what they are doing not brilliant? Before now, there wasn't anyone going after the, what I will call, simple-flyer market.
Well, it depends how you define "making money" and what your expectations are.
We did a scenery for Cloud9 a while ago, KMCO obviously, which still looks very good today:
We used an approach similar to Blueprint's, a default AFCAD (which was *very* accurate anyway, just with a default texture), but we had a good photoreal background and the 3d modeling was very high quality, not much different that what we are doing now, with native FSX advanced materials on buildings, bump-mapping, specular reflections, etc. AND moving jetways, all things that Blueprint doesn't do even today.
We might say it wasn't a drastically different product than BP's KMCO, even if we believe our version still looks better, and it's light years better than default anyway.
JUST the fact that Cloud9 KMCO had a default texture for ground, resulted in sales which are, as of today, ONE TENTH of Zurich or JFK.
So, if Blueprint is making money selling that kind of stuff, then they are much better then we are, at least in marketing skills.
Or, they might simply not care, and doing this like a sort of a glorified hobby so their expectations are lower: we have more than one people in our team who pay all their bills with Flight sim stuff, and not doing any other jobs. If you ask around any Flight sim developer (just try on fsdeveloper.com), is not very common.
Or, is it a question of price ? Do you think if we lowered Cloud9's price, it would surge in sales ? We had several promotions on Cloud9 products in the past were it was possible to purchase everything at 40% less, but people keep buying things like KLAX, KDCA, EHAM or ENBR, which are more similar to what we do NOW. Even the little ENBR, which surely is far less important airport than KMCO, has outsold it...
So, as far our experience is concerned, the overall graphic look has a direct impact on sales, and putting some default elements in a scenery basically killed it in the market, even if the rest of the airport was (and still is) very good.