Think of Captain America: his resurrection in the Silver Age was a total retcon/reboot; in the Timely/Atlas titles, he did not face a villain named Baron Zemo who rigged a drone plane with explosives, which detonated, killing Bucky and sending Cap into suspended animation. Yet, this entirely new history was supposed to tie into the original Golden Age, which created a number of problems anytime writers had to retcon or re-invent to link Golden to Silver - forward. The same happened when Englehart created a heretofore unknown history of the 50's Cap and Bucky, which is supposed fit somewhere in those late Golden Age stories. Same with Giant Size Avengers #1 (1974) with the retconned plot concerning the Whizzer(and his relation to the Scalet Witch and Quicksliver...until even that was dumped only a few years later). Rarely did such tinkering ever create the fluid history of a universe as intended, and this all pre-dated COIE.

I'm with you on those examples, and I can see your points. There was no "Earth-1/Earth-2" reconciliation of the characters per my prior comments in this case, but outright retconning. But having read all of those Silver/Bronze Age stories as a kid with no exposure to Golden Age Cap or Invaders (reprints were not widely available), I didn't make that connection. Again, this is just where I was coming from, but Crisis did some hard retconning that moved my cheese.

Late night insomnia musings here, but getting back to the topic of Crisis as a standalone story versus an event, again I originally had the intention of this being more around the ramifications to DC continuity going forward. To me, Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were much bigger events in terms of standalone stories.

But as also often discussed in the past, that brought me back around to how Crisis really was not nearly as disruptive to Batman's continuity (Earth-2 Helena aside) as it was to the Superman family. Superman was just a gut punch to me, most immediately because of the death of Kara but then an attempt to reboot with a quasi Golden Age approach. Depowered, no Superboy, no Supergirl, etc. And the Legion became this sort of anomaly, clever as the "pocket universe" idea was to keep it alive. Personally, I always liked the more powerful version of Superman because it allowed for more interesting "non-combat" activities like time travel, deep space travel, etc. And even on the creative side, Byrne was all the rage at the time of course, but the loss of Curt Swan never felt right. He simply "was" the Superman artist, I would have loved him on at least one title until he retired.

Dark Knight was not a retcon event in itself obviously, but highly influenced where they took the character next. And when revision activity kicked in with Year One, it wasn't quite as abrupt as the above. Yeah, the Selina Kyle thing was yucky, but if you had been on Miller's ride with Daredevil you knew it was the same playbook. He had trashed Karen Page as well. But otherwise, it was just a grittier version, and David Mazzuccelli's art, holy cow that was great and fit the character so well. And no sad creator dismissal on the level of what happened with Swan. The mainstream Batman titles kind of just continued on, then expanded with the character's popularity, and I feel like DC had a lot more success here in the years that followed.

This is more of an aside, but I wish Byrne had left FF sometime in '84, and come over to DC then and taken on Superman (Swan stays on art on one of the titles). Pre-Crisis continuity, but still heavily injects his creativity (which WAS needed at that point). Plus no "Malice" storyline in '85 in FF (among other things), win-win.

To this day Marvel has never straightened out its retconning / continuity issues, and in some cases instituted more screw ups. As mentioned before, COIE was not only addressing a need for DC (internally), but answering many a reader's requests for years. Letters pages from the 60s and 70s were no strangers to readers complaining about the unwieldy, silly "universe" that rarely allowed continuity (or sense) from one title to the next. Comic readers expected coherence in their "serious" comics, and DC barely had that, save for a few titles. COIE was the long-awaited, logical remedy for a problem DC apparently did not care to address up to a point.

The only kind of major comic line that successfully skated around larger continuity / loose history issues sans the need for a housecleaning was Archie, where the characters could be anywhere, do anything throughout the decades (fully embracing era-defining trends), yet would never have readers question the here one year, gone another supporting characters, relatives, relationships, even character names, occupations, or how they were teens during WW2, Vietnam, Desert Storm, etc. 

I'm 57, so get off mah lawn!

I wasn't invested in the pre-Crisis DC universe. Like Confessor, I was a Marvel guy. I did know about Earth-2, Earth-W and Earth-S, and thought the concept was pretty cool, allowing different versions of the world to co-exist in one coherent universe; it was in no way the confusing mess that some writers and editors made it to be. When we learned about the possibility of a company-wide reboot (I think it was in Dick Giordano's column, in which a fan letter suggesting the idea was presented), I thought that it might be a good idea, but unnecessary. When Crisis came out, my initial reaction of "Meh, so they did it. All right. As long as Marvel doesn't follow suit..."

I voted "bad", but wouldn't say that the Crisis series was Plan 9 from Outer Space bad, especially because of Perez's contribution. It was still pretty nonsensical as a stand-alone story and its repercussions ultimately took away more than they gave.

As someone said above, I enjoyed the exposure that several more obscure characters got; at the same time, I regretted that for many of them it only meant appearing in one or two panels in which they say "Ah! I am struck a mortal blow!" ...I had more fun identifying the obscure DC characters in Kingdom Come, many years later.

Rebooting the DC universe might have worked, and in all honesty I did enjoy the Man of Steel miniseries and the Wonder Woman re-imagining. However, problems started to crop up almost immediately. How do you retain your Legion of super-heroes continuity if Superboy never existed? Where do the Warlord's adventures occur since our own planet is clearly not hollow? What do you do when the reboot of a character (Truman's Hawkman) clashes with the traditional version that DC also wants to use? What happens when creators still want to use characters who were erased from reality (Supergirl, for example)? A mess of continuity fixes is what happens, that's what, requiring a second Crisis (Zero Hour) a few years down the line... a second fix that made things even more confused. I think DC's strategy with the Crisis failed largely because it tried to have its cake and eat it too. Make something new but still catering to long-time fans (and to the interests of fans turned authors). It was an almost impossible mission.

It's worth noting that sales-wise, Crisis was a success, as was the revamp. IIRC, sales were up 22% after the revamp. Man of Steel #1 was the best selling issue of 1986, and DC beat Marvel in direct market sales for the first time in the summer of '87. 

I feel like Marvel tried to pull a sort of Crisis with Onslaught, but instead of the "soft reboot" tried to do a full reboot with Heroes Reborn. I forget if they claimed the intention was always to return to the status quo with Heroes Return, but if Reborn had actually been successful, I question if they wouldn't have stuck with it.