The real issue is with the creative talent, not with the characters.

Characters are just words and lines on a page. They come armed with a concept and after that it's up to the writers and artist to make it all interesting. I submit that there is no idea that lacks potential. Everyone of the characters mentioned here from Superman to Human Torch can be written well, even if they haven't always been. You can make a god interesting or a guy that sets himself on fire interesting. Right off the bat those are two concepts rich in fascination. Lets blame the creators not their characters for the latter's failings. The sense that we are getting such a varied opinion here suggests that no character is inherently irredeemable.

Number 3, checking in.

There's lot of good stuff in there, and metatextual commentary on superheroes and society and all sorts of great stuff.... but there's also a lot of boring crap in there (pirate comics, I'm looking at you! yes, I understand that you replace superheroes in a a world with superheroes, no, I don't care, and your comics are very very dull) and the ending is so far beyond stupid that even the film managed a better one.

True... so very true. I liked what Hickman did with the FF, especially the Future Foundation and finally finding a personality for Johnny that wasnt being a giant dickhead. So of course its all gone now.

That's the appeal of Doom; he IS smarter than everyone and better at just about everything, but his insane ego -- which, amazingly, is still comparatively over-inflated even given the fact that he is an absolute genius of the highest order -- bites him in the ass time and time again. Taking that into consideration, I wouldn't say that Doom is "commentary-free."

I don't recognize him anymore. I think he was last in the AI Avengers book that was just cancelled.

He thought he was restoring them to the original state. He did that with the Fantastic Four and Superman. Usually he ignored any development that occurred in the meanwhile.

That's correct, but the "back to the basics" approach does not work for all characters. I think he did a bang-up job with the Fantastic Four. While he did not refer to the years between Stan and Jack's run and his own overmuch, he did allow a lot of development. Johnny was much more mature under John's guidance than the hotheaded youth he's still sometimes described as; love interests changed; the iconic Baxter Building was replaced by the exquisitely-designed Four Freedom plaza; Reed and Sue tried living in a small town under secret identities… It was all very much "illusion of change without actual change", but the characters were never thrown back into something they hadn't been for years; they were still growing. Good job.

With Vision, it was just a case of "oh, I don't like the development of the character and I'll just erase it all". Gone was the marriage to Wanda, gone were the kids, gone were the emotions, gone was the personality. It was a case of destroying everything just for the sake of a blank slate, which rarely is a good thing. The subsequent crap about Wonder Man loving Wanda and refusing to give Vision his personality back just compounded my loss of interest.

The same thing happened with X-O Manowar at Valiant toward the end of the series: the character lost his house, his company, his entire supporting cast, his love interest, just so we could get one guy in an alien armor with no strings attached. Not satisfying. (At least that was not John's doing!)

And naturally, it's also what happened to Wolverine when he got back to his yellow spandex and learned his memories were implants. Blechhhh.