I wasn't reading comics when this stuff came out, but everything in Nightwing from around that time and all of War Games strikes me as intentionally being one big gigantic trainwreck. It's Murphy's Law gone wild: what can go wrong will go wrong. It was just tragedy after tragedy [...]
In other words, exactly what I find detestable about the current NuSpidey era. Once there are so many tragedies piling on top of each other that it becomes improbable, it is, by definition, no longer "realistic" - it is reveling in nihilism for its own sake, and it automatically gets shitcanned by me.
Frank Miller's "Born Again" arc on Daredevil was a good story, BACK THEN, but much like "The Dark Phoenix Saga," it's become a story that I now wish could be RETROACTIVELY UNWRITTEN, simply because of all the hamfisted attempts to recreate it, pretty much every single one of which has been devoid of any merit whatsoever. I'd actual rather that the original good stories had NEVER BEEN TOLD, just so we could avoid all the shitty stories that they inevitably spawned.
And I don't care about the end catharsis, if the struggle is one that I can't accept that the character should have been stupid and weak and OOC enough to get into in the first place.