I have so much to say on this topic, but in case my irony meter isn’t broken:

GMT is small-time. Super small-time. Big for wargames, but they’re a niche of a niche. Probably more copies of WWW out than any given non-reprint GMT game from the same year.

COIN is Volko Ruhnke’s baby — Andean Abyss is almost entirely his work. Triumph and Tragedy is a 20-year labor of love from Craig Besinque pretty much solo. Churchill is Mark Herman solo. The later games in the series tend to be paired designers, but I know that at least Cuba Libre was the guy approaching Volko and asking for help.

As for pre-modern warfare, I was a playtester for Falling Sky, and I think it may be my second favorite in the series (right behind A Distant Plain, though that may change on release).

My own (slow-moving) COIN design is set in 1901-ish, during the Boxer Uprising, and the system works fine for that. To use Paul’s RPG analogy: it’s like the Apocalypse World hack-splosion. People want to shim everything into the system, and since it works so well, even odd shims that aren’t a good match still play well enough.

So much to say.