That’d probably be me (saying that we should be glad Tamiya continues to have an occasional release in 1/16th scale).

In my opinion, Tamiya’s management probably does these passion projects without too much concern on volume or profit. If you look at the rest of their product line over the years you see they’ve done things as diverse as solar powered cars, radio controlled sailboats, tracked conversions for 4WD trucks - the list just goes on.

Its only more recently that the Chinese manufacturers started making their own unique tanks rather than just following(ahem) Tamiya’s lead most of the time, and the 1/16th scale genre is all the better for it