People read comics (or consume any form of entertainment really) for the most disparate reasons, so if someone only reads X-Men comics if Character X is featured, I say to each their own.
I also have my favorites obviously but do I really care for them to be featured at whatever cost, regardless of the use the writer actually makes of them? I absolutely love Storm but did her presence really make a difference in, say, Marc Guggenheim's X-Men Gold? She might as well just have been featured in that 2 parter towards the end of the series, but had she been in limbo for the rest, or as a background character doing absolutely nothing, it wouldn't have made the slightest amount of difference to me because she never added anything to the story anyway.