That she did, and I was so frickin' mad that I quite comics for a year. All comics. I felt like my emotional investment in that character had been manipulated in a very crass way, and that if it happened with one title it could happen with all of them. It took Alan Moore's later Swamp Thing stories to bring me back to reading comics, and then again only tentatively with just a few titles. (Man, how I regretted it years later, when I had to hunt down back issues of my interrupted Conan runs!)

You make a good point about bad writing creating bad stories, but I'd argue that using a character's death is a dangerous thing. It can easily distract us from the fact that a particular story doesn't have much to offer beside it. Like sugar in a lot of snacks, it's the one thing someone notices; it's only after the sugar buzz that we realize there was little good in there. I find it's particularly true when the death occurs in some event book. (There are of course no absolutes; although the death of Xavier in AvX was not necessary to the plot and that the series itself wasn't particularly good, the aftermath of that death was actually pretty interesting).