Bring the discussion back to X-Factor... here is an amazing article on the idea of X-Factor, and who would be the fifth female member of the group, as per the recollections of the Marvel bullpen, and X-Men and incoming X-Factor creative teams at the time.

This is a very informative article as I didn't even know Chris Claremont was adamantly against the idea of bringing back Jean and that he suggested Jean's sister Sara to become the fifth member. Also, I didn't know Kurt Busiek was the brainchild of the idea behind The Return of Jean Grey in the pages of the Avengers and Fantastic Four.

secretsbehindthexmen.blogspot.com/2012/03/jean-greys-return-in-x-factor.html

I read it in a trade paperback, but it should be in New X-Men #150, the issue Magneto kills her.

Excellent find!   I new about the Kurt Busiek thing, but I don't think I realized just how much Claremont was pissed off.  

Here's another find regarding Scott Summers. It's interesting to note just how much Scott Summers' character was damaged because of the return of Jean Grey and the birth of X-Factor.

It seems the character will never recover his heroic persona pre X-Factor #1. It's sad, but he is a casualty of what I have always called "Editorial sabotage."

community.fortunecity.ws/tatooine/niven/142/opinion/opi18.html

What I can't get my head around is how anyone could have thought that they could pull a stunt like Cyclops dumping his wife and child like that without destroying the character. The lame excuse from that time, "she told me not to come back if I walked out that door" doesn't help, it even makes things worse.

If bringing Jean back had to be done, I think it would have been better to go all the way with the retcon. Jean returns, Maddie simply vanishes, and everyone realizes that she was never more than a manifestation of the Phoenix, created to take the place of the character killed in X-Men #137.

This might actually have worked because when he introduced Maddie, Chris Claremont was deliberately dropping hints that she wasn't a " normal" person: there had been a child named Madelyne Pryor in a hospital visited by Spider-Woman shortly after Jean's death; Maddie's mind couldn't be read by Charles Xavier; she was a dead ringer for Jean; there was no trace of a Madelyne Pryor in official documents; she was the sole survivor of a 747 crash that occurred at the same time as Jean's death, and we saw her walking off the blaze with a Phoenix effect behind her. All of that was later used in the "Maddie is a Phoenix-connected creation of Mr. Sinister" retcon, but I think it would have been less damaging for all involved for Maddie to have been a Phoenix avatar all along.

Vanishing into thin air after Jean's return, she would have left Scott a single father and brooding widower, not a scumbag deadbeat dad. Much better as far as public relations go, if you ask me.

There's a feeling of improvisation about that period: the baby remained nameless for months and months, as if nobody wanted to handle the matter; Scott took half a year and more to go back to his wife only to discover that she had disappeared and all traces of her existence had been erased... It really feels like no one had a clear idea of what to do with the Summers family and with Jean's return, and that the problems were just pushed away in the future, to be resolved at a later date (and preferably by someone else). 

Jean's return isn't only bad from an old reader's perspective; even in the context of the character's history it would make little sense for her to join X-Factor. Accepting the idea that she had been replaced by a doppelgänger in issue #101, it means that the Jean that was extracted from a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay is the one who had turned her back on superheroing for good in X-Men #95. That Jean had been involved in the events that would bring forth the Phoenix solely because she had been abducted by Steven Lang's sentinels. 

Coming back to life years after her "death", finding her lover married to another woman, facing a life turned topsy-turvy by the madness of a superhero's career, I can't for the life of me understand why she'd decide to resume her career as Marvel Girl... and especially not when it also involves fomenting fear and hatred toward her fellow mutants, as per the original mandate of the X-Factor mutant hunters. 

I think you may be right about a "no easy way out" mandate regarding Cyclops. I've no idea how that played out, but it would fit with the way things were done at Marvel under Jim Shooter's aegis. I just think that if you're going to pull a stunt as damaging to the willing suspension of disbelief as Jean's return, you might as well go all the way.

The more I read these comments the more I realize that this title was the death of Marvel for me. Sure, I enjoyed Apocalypse as a bad guy, the introduction of Archangel, and some terrific Walt Simonson art but this is where my personal Marvel universe changed for the worse.

What should have happened is that Scott and Maddie would have never been seen again after X-Men 175.

Of course that is not how it works in comic book land.