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Allowing an independant company to license GW IP would make some business sense, but you have to consider the following points.
This independent company would end competing with GW's core business, which is not producing fluff (or even rules), but selling overpriced models (that's a rant for another time). For example, I would never, ever consider starting WHFB or especially WH40K (a waste of money for what I consider crappy rules), although I play Epic, BFG, and used to like Man'O'War. I also have some Warmaster models somewhere... With Fanatic as an inside department or a semi-independent filial, GW ends getting my money anyway. With a licensing model, they get some money from the independant company and not much after that. I suspect GW only tolerates FW because they are not in the same price league for the stuff that "counts" (ie Battle and 40K models).
A large part of the work at GW seems to be about keeping the fluff "coherent" (using the term very loosely here, that's another rant for another time). Remember how many times JJ said on the SG forum "I'll have to check that with the WH40K team", or stuff like "the 40K team said Necrons couldn't get an air force in Epic...". All creativity (fluff, design, perhaps even rules...) in the independent company would have to go through the veto of the 40K team, which would lengthen development time, and end costing a lot to both the independent company and GW. In the end, incoherences in the fluff would be unavoidable, and the only incoherences GW seems to accept are the ones they create themselves.
Don't forget GW never hesitated killing their own games if they started casting a shadow on their 2 main cash cows (3 now with LotR), or if it became apparent that those games could provide a lot of enjoyment with a minimal amount of money invested (like Bloodbowl where buying your team and its Champion would be enough for a long, long fun time).
The silly thing, of course, is that it seems this "restructuration" (downsizing of SG) is a move by GW to focus their resources of their developers on the main games, whereas the strength they have was in their comprehensive range of games on all scales (in the 40K universe, you have space battle scale (BFG), combined arms scale (EA), tactical/skirmish (WH40K), and even sub-tactical (Inquisitor). That's a lot of options and variety, and a tremendous incentive to play several games for combined campaigns. But GW seems to focus their business on cookie-cutter players, for whom variety and choice are anathema.
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