So why didn't this game work? And by "work" I mean why wasn't it successful?
Dirty secret: Me and my group played a helluva lot more Planetstorm than we did Legions of Steel. We played the crap out of the playtest rules even before Planetstorm was released.
It required a ton more figures than Legions of Steel did, so from a marketing perspective it makes sense that you'd lead with LoS, hook people on the boardgame, and then lead them down the path of a full tabletop miniatures game, forcing them to buy and buy and buy. So why didn't that really happen? For me the biggest challenge for Planetstorm was a big enough table and enough terrain (I never managed to play on the recommended 8 x 4 table; we regularly played on a 6 x 4 table, instead). But 40K was already standard and that used the same recommended table size.
And the rules themselves are really, really good. If I play again I'm gonna house rule you pin on 1 under your kill number instead of on your kill number, based on my memory of how ineffective high ROF 5+ kill weapons were (Flechette, RPK), but I think that's the only tweak I'd personally make. Everything else seems solid.
So as I'm re-reading them I'm thinking "why didn't this game ever take off?"
And as a side note, in Legions of Steel I'm gonna start taking away one leadership from non-elite units to simulate the need to constantly command them in order for them to act independently.