Well, considering it was the lackluster sales of the extremes of the market (extremely fanservicey and extremely intellectual) that dealt a lot of the damage to the US anime market, seeing the service heavy titles still make it over, even with much better deals supposedly being cut is a different issue, and cause for concern as it would implicate a lack of learning from the crash. It's somewhat weird that the service niche continues get titles brought over, ahead of relatively broad audience shonens and ahead of equally niche but much more unique intellectual series (more on that later.)
It's as if they are assuming that they can get out of the slump by going to the old mode of fanservice first, even though the demographics of anime have dramatically changed in the past decade.
Strike Witches was "very inexpensive". That's directly from Adam Sheehan's mouth as of SakuraCon2009. Funi won't have to sell many copies of it at all to be in the black on it. They also bought it having not seen the service heavy DVD cut. Still, they got it cause it was cheap, and that may be the case for a lot of the service titles - they typically have already made money in Japan off DVRAB and merch, they don't have top notch staffers, so said Japanese sales result in domestic profitability, and the Japanese companies have finally understood that rather risking destroying a publisher by demanding a huge upfront payment, they can license it cheap, knowing every DVD sold internationally is icing on the cake, not an essential.
And now you know.
Lastly, to me, the complaints probably aren't so much the content of Queen's Blade (though, it's been called by some the most explicit anime series to make to broadcast, and the episode summaries seem to suggest that's a legit analysis,) it's that while yet another service show gets picked up, more mainstream and also more unique niche titles sit unlicensed, possibly to the detriment of the industry as a whole (like I said extreme service titles were a cash loser for a lot the industry because they were so common and so generic they weren't getting bought.)
At least if companies bought over something like Detroit Metal City or Kemonozume or Windy Tales, you'd be bringing over something different. It maybe no more beneficial to the company than QB, but it'd be distinct on the market place. On the flipside, if you're gonna ride a genre, why not a popular shonen - it may cost you some more, but it'd yield more as well. You can merch it for everyone from young budding anime fans to the hardcore old guard, and likely across gender lines too.
It's a weird move to constantly make, and though maybe rab's just great at hustling deals on service shows, one worries about the viability of that in the long term given the history of the genre in the US. It's not been a safe bet for atleast half-a-decade.
