I came about my love for JLI in an unusual way. I never bought any of the Giffen/DeMatteis issues when they originally came out. But when I saw that Superman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, etc... were coming back to JL, I bought the issue above. I became curious as to who Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle, Booster, Fire, Ice, Crimson Fox, etc... were and went back to my comic store to buy some of the Giffen/DeMatteis early issues. It just so happened that The Gospel of Maxwell Lord trade paperback came out around this time. I bought that and the previous TPB of this run and fell in love with the writing and art.
I ended up buying the entire Giffen/DeMatteis run in the course of about 3 to 6 months. So I got a huge dose of the entire five years in a short amount of time. Ironically, I bought very few of the new JLA/JLE books because I found the writing to be so inferior to the previous run. I dropped them pretty soon after the Death of Superman.