To each their own, but I really can't agree with you on this one.  The New Avengers stories were not nearly good enough to justify the massive damage he did to the Avengers to enable him to set up the scenario he wanted.  He killed Hawkeye (enough on its own to earn a "boo" from me), Jack of Hearts, Vision, and Ant-Man, and did a ton of damage to the Scarlet Witch that took years and retcons to undo.

Little bit.

"Classic" here means "old", rather than "worth existing".

I consider the Bendis Run to be head and shoulders above the Avengers from about 300 up, with the exception of the Busiek run. I'm an old school fan too.

I don't want to debate New Avengers too much, because it will inevitably lead to me flying into a berserker rage and throwing random objects out my window into the street.

But since you brought up Ronin, it's kind of a perfect example of how bad and lazy Bendis was. First, we get this overhyped "big surprise reveal" that we have to wait months for. I mean, Ronin is on the cover of issue #1, but doesn't actually show up until like #12 or something, and even then doesn't actually join the team. So we get a year of ridiculously dragged out non-stories that would make Claremont blush, all the while being assured that this Ronin thing, when they get to it, is going to blow our socks off.

Of course, people immediately guessed it was going to be Hawkeye. So, just because he wants it to be a "surprise," he randomly changes it to Echo. This is so bad on so many levels, I need to make a list:

1. There's no possible way that a busty female is Ronin. Ronin is very clearly drawn as a chiseled man on the cover of #1. Then, all of a sudden, it's a curvaceous woman? WTF. No.

2. The twist "surprise" is clearly more important than the actual plot of the story or the characters involved. Think about that. If Ronin being Hawkeye meant anything to the story, he wouldn't be able to change it, nor would he really care if people guessed it. Instead, he constructs this whole reveal simply for the gimmick of the reveal - who is being revealed and what role they play in the story (i.e. none, as it turns out) is of no actual meaning.

3. He makes the big reveal be a character that only fans of his own previous work would have ever even heard of! Not being someone who had read any previous Bendis, this reveal struck me as being tremendously egotistical, like most of his work on New Avengers, which was essentially Bendis taking his Luke/Jessica story from Alias, adding in a Spider-Man/Wolverine team-up and slapping an Avengers logo on it. At the same time, the Echo reveal also shamelessly pandered to his fanboys.

4. He then just drops Echo/Ronin from the book, waits a year and a half, and brings back Ronin, only now it's Hawkeye like he originally planned. So, again, the whole big Echo reveal was completely meaningless in every possible way, except to allow Bendis to pointlessly drag things out as far as humanly possible, which seems to be his one major writing skill.

It wasn't Hawkeye's death or the even end of the Avengers that bothered me, it was the fact that the story was terrible, and the new stories that it cleared the way for were even worse.

I agree that all this was exactly as ridiculous as you describe, but I see it as typical more of contemporary Big 2 comics in general than of Bendis in particular - though he's such a relentless self-promoter that he's become a convenient representative of all that.

This is how creative decisions seem to be made now - not by writers for story considerations, but by committees for marketing/business reasons. Not that that never happened before, but it's become so heavily weighted on that side that I find it very hard to work up any interest in the latest Marvel/DC product. The only thing that keeps the balance from tipping over altogether is the abiding affection or at least curiosity I feel for the characters I read as a kid. So I still look at the occasional preview - though come to think of it I find myself doing less and less of even that much since the Classics left CBR - but that's about as far as it goes.

I don't think the modern Marvel/DC output is entirely without merit - I've even read some snatches of Bendis that I quite like - and I don't thnk the individual writers are completely cynical hacks: I believe that all of them care about writing the best stories they can write, almost all are competent craftsmen, and a few are genuinely gifted. But I do think that they're operating under a cynical system that constrains them far more closely than was the case in, say, the pre-Shooter Marvel era. Hence the absurd contortions you list - which I remember just from being a CBR frequenter - I wasn't even reading any of those series at the time.

So I'll try a few individual things here and there: e.g. enjoyed the Charlie Huston Moon Knight recently, though that's now a few years old;  reading Morrison's Multiversity currently; will read Ellis's Moon Knight soon; might give Hickman's Avengers a go if I like his independent stuff when I get around to trying some of that. But by and large I can tell the current stuff isn't for me.