Remember when Wonder Man could sustain his own title and then you killed him off in the first issue of Force Works? The 90s Avengers were always special to me since you had no idea what you were doing and that meant that ANYTHING could happen. A shared universe with a roadmap is ultimately predictable. A Shared universe with no plan in place is amazingly random.

I suspect you think that there was less of a road map in those days than there was. You seem to be under the impression that killing Wonder Man in FORCE WORKS was some radical left turn, a last-minute decision. but it wasn’t I was around for that, and the way it went was this: Wonder Man’s own title was about to be cancelled. They were looking for a character to kill off in FORCE WORKS #1 (I know, strange priorities), and hit upon the notion of doing this to Wonder Man. In order to preserve the surprise, Marvel solicited about four issues of Wonder Man that were fakes, never written, never intended to be published. The plans that people had may have been dumb plans sometimes, but they were still plans.