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To address the original hypothetical question, though, it is a rather difficult scenario to imagine. I can get a picture in my head of what the Mirage TMNT would have been like had the multimedia franchise never happened, and that is... almost exactly as it was in our universe. The Mirage comics resisted/ignored the cartoon and toyline stuff most of the time, so aside from excluding a few gag references, I think things would have turned out largely the same, save for maybe less titles published (since the windfall of the licensing deal would have left them with less cash to throw around for minor profits).
But a Mirage TMNT without the ensemble Mirage crew; just Eastman and Laird? I think truthfully the book just wouldn't have lasted very long and might have petered out somewhere in the #20s. With the unreliable release schedule, and it being a self-published indie comic, I don't see Eastman and Laird subsisting off its earnings for much longer than a couple more years before pursuing other creative projects or just getting dayjobs to put food on the table. They might have been able to parlay TMNT's indie success into more lucrative gigs with the Big Two, maybe even gotten onto some of those characters they said they dreamed of working on in early interviews (Daredevil for Eastman, the Demon for Laird). But TMNT probably would've just sorta gone away.
As for creatively? Who knows. Something similar to the Exile to Northampton/Return to New York storylines we got, since that seemed to be the direction they were headed in before hiring on staff and then getting the licensing deal, but after that? Impossible to tell. I'd say it would be a blander universe, but we can never really know for sure. In lieu of Leatherhead and the Rat King, we might've gotten even MORE interesting characters. Maybe even ones they conceived for non-TMNT projects years later. A proto-Lord Tyler from Melting Pot as a TMNT villain? Crap, man, I dunno.
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