I don't recall specifically why I think this, but my impression of Iron Heroes was that it was an early attempt at making a modern game with D&D trappings, so they used tokens for various sub-systems -- some of which were pretty decent, others of which were just plain counter-productive. (Except it wasn't actually all that early.)

If there were a good autopsy done on the system, with a focus on what worked vs. what failed, it seems like that could be a very useful tool for designing future games.

But overall it was interesting as an experiment, not useful as an end-product.