I will say that, traditionally, in the past, readers of RHATO and Red Hood/Arsenal can notice where stories were set-up and set-up and set-up, only to have the conclusion of the story go careening off the tracks. I can say that there have been many times where I’ve started a story and someone from upstairs decreed that a particular plot thread had to be dropped, or a whole other plot thread needed to be added, or an entire story arc had to be gutted in the middle of the story. Those times have been very frustrating for me—but as a professional writer of some thirty years, I’ve always felt that part of the profession means that I need to turn in the story the editor/publisher wants and not always the story I want to write, or begin, or end.
Similarly, when an editor says “you need more narration here to explain what is going on” or “we would prefer you write third-person omnipresent because so many of our books are written first-person” or “we want you to use thought balloons on this title, but not thought balloons on that title,” then that is what I do, because that is what I’m asked to do.
Maybe more to your point, I love both my editors on Red Hood and the Outlaws since Rebirth. They are both great guys and great editors.
But I had a much bigger storyline to start the series with, and it was tossed, and I was asked to write Black Mask as the main villain for the first arc. I admit that I agonized over that for the first few months of the series. Unlike even a Lex Luthor or Joker (who at least have battle suits and toxic Joker gas), Black Mask has no powers at all. He’s not even someone as inherently evil as the Penguin. He is just a guy who has henchmen with Tommy guns.
I was so angry for months that I had the chance to write Red Hood, Artemis and Bizarro—Trinity level super heroes—and the big villain they were up against was the Black Mask?!
Let’s take a minute and put it in perspective: any one of the three heroes could easily defeat every henchman Black Mask could order up and kill off Black Mask if they started out at sunrise, and still be home for breakfast. The idea that he would last five minutes against the Dark Trinity would be laughable. But that’s what I was tasked with.
Since it was going to be the first arc, though—and because I didn’t have any say in it—I was forced to concentrate almost entirely on character and less on plot (when I say “forced,” it didn’t take much, because my inclination is to always focus more on character than plot). So maybe what you and Batman News and other people are responding to was more the change of pacing from the first series: instead of hitting the ground running with a preexisting relationship between Jason, Roy and Kori (which wasn’t necessarily what people were expecting), the Rebirth had a much slower pace, and the characters were introduced to each other and to the readers with more detail.