Nellisir
Hero
Yes, exactly that.
That's true. But they don't even try. Instead, comics these days seem to be all about the next big event - it seems they have a massive universe-changing event planned every couple of years.
One bigger driver in the comics market is the decline of comic book stores and the rise of the collected trade. I'm not sure why it took so long to switch over (might have to do with the audience getting older and having more income and desire for a sturdier, shelf-worthy product), but there's a really high priority nowadays on stand-alone story arcs that span 4-6 issues, and can be easily collected into a trade. That's a big change in plotting and scripting. Event storylines sell books and provide cross-fertilization between lines. An X-crossover is a big deal, but one that crosses between different lines (ie the Black Vortex, which crossed Guardians and X-Men) potentially doubles the audience.
Personally, I had vowed to quit buying monthlies after Secret Wars and just get the trades. I'll run a few months behind, but there's not exactly a dearth of back material to acquire (or I could just...save the money). I'm a little bit on the fence now (clever Marvel - spinning out Secret Wars has given me a loophole to start buying the new X-books, since SW technically isn't done yet), but still leaning that way.
Would really like to see more of the Australian X-Men issues collected together. That time period is really foundational to a lot of stuff that's still in play today.