I’m going to forego a line-by-line reply and boil it down to this one statement of yours:

“Change for change’s sake is not a good thing.”

That sums up my entire point in #4. So much of these “events” (which I nonetheless rather enjoy) are earth-shattering changes to the status quo… that are then negated about 6 months later with the next big event, or the next major story arc in a character’s solo series. Some of these concepts (like the fallout from Civil War) were so fascinating, I would have liked to have spent more time there, watching as my favorite characters found their way through this strange new world. But typically 6-12 months later, the publisher suddenly believes they’ve exhausted all of the stories they can tell in this scenario. And to me, it feels like they’re squandering all the storytelling potential they spent so much effort creating.

I love big, crazy concepts too. The bigger, the better. And I respect that a lot of superhero comics are built on the idea of introducing big crazy new stuff (for folks like Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, this is the stock in trade). But when a story does nothing but introduce endless concepts at the expense of actual storytelling, you’ve lost me.