Bringing this all back to Yen Plus… They've actually run two one-shots over their lifetime; Forget-Me-Not, by Queenie Chan, which was very good, and Prom Night, by George Alexopoulos, which, ah… had potential. It's unfortunate that these artists are losing a forum.

But the reason why I bring them up is because, if their project is successful, it would give publishers more incentive to put together a one-shot mag. But again, we are looking at a small talent pool (and several similar projects in the past that have failed–the difference with F*X*T is that they seem to have legitimately GOOD talent). It’s all very speculative at this point :)

This sounds like sort of what F*X*T is trying to do:
http://manga.about.com/b/2010/04/29/fxt-magazine-hopes-to-kickstart-new-comicsmanga-anthology.htm

Although they have 4 continuous stories and 1 one-shot. But essentially, the editor is trying to create a talent-pool for readers to sample from.

I hope they are successful, and pave the way for more projects that are similar. I’d love to see a one-shot magazine that gave readers a taste of what new/developing talents had to offer, but unfortunately I don’t think the market is ready for it yet. The “talent pool” is still relatively small, and publishers aren’t in the mood to take risks. But this can (and will) change, it just needs some time.

I suppose that’s one way to look at it, particularly as Yen Plus will soon be dead to those of us who prefer reading comics on paper, but it was possible to enjoy Yen Plus on the simpler level of just featuring ongoing serialization of a bunch of different comics, start to (theoretically) finish.

“The print editions of Yen Plus were too costly to justify a monthly expense”

I disagree with this as well – given the amount of content in each issue, I think it was a very fair value. In particular, the pagecount-to-dollar ratio was always better than buying one volume of a collection.

“Put together a diverse collection of one-shot stories”

An idealistic thought, but as you hypothesized, it’s probably impractical. It would mean constantly seeking out and negotiating with different comic creators each month, and it might not be so easy to monetize the result into collected volumes – unless the same batch of creators were used for each issue, and at that pont, why not let them stretch their wings with continuous, multi-issue stories?