Increasingly, mini painting has been eating my life. I tried to fight off 40k obsession but it's been slowly pulling me in for a while now. But probably the weirder part is, I haven't actually played the game yet. Still trying to get everything tabletop ready.
Was into mini painting for a while when my partner and his friends still used to play BattleTech. I did play a bit myself but painting was much more exciting. :D I'd love to get back to it - always looking enviously at the Warhammer displays in our games store.
Do it! The characters make great display pieces even if they're not being used for anything. You can also try looking into 3d printed stuff, which is much cheaper, if you don't care about it being tournament legal or anything.
Yep, it's quite tempting. There are a lot of mini companies that sell .stl files so that you could make proxies for Warhammer armies or just make tons of cool display pieces. Small studios can even publish whole game systems online with just .stl and .pdf files.
The problem is just finding people to play them...