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Honestly I think meta-chasers are a smaller part of it. One other aspect is that many long term fans have armies already so when GW focuses on one it can spark a whole focus on that army.
It's also likely really hard for GW to estimate sales because the spikes are somewhat random. GW can make an army the focus and its a blip or they can make it a focus and its the next big thing.
Eg one of the ork boxes for Middle Earth was at one time out-selling space marines - which is pretty much unheard of.
These spikes are likely really hard to work with as a firm. It might also be GW knows how big the spike will be and yet don't have production space but won't stop the spike happening; they just know they will sell out of some stuff and hope that people will just shift their money to other brand products whilst waiting.
The only real items I feel GW continually undersells on are print products.
Cards for games are clearly always understocked because they sell out like crazy. They also seem to have a short term shelf life from GW to start with, which is a real pain when GW makes them a part of the game experience at the design phase.
The other are things like art books, special books and basically anything from BL that isn't a paperback or ebook. Gw likes to do these in random print runs or made to orders. But even the made to order are often only 2 weeks or so every X number of years (and that's IF they choose to reprint it later).
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