I used Nu52 as a jumping off point from DC.
New 52 for DC. Prior to that I think DC hit a level of maturity in it's lineup where it simultaneously honored the legacy characters, brought back the old favorites, allowed them to coexist and kicked off the next generation. It also reestablished the pre Crisis characters enough for that to be relevant as well. DC's strength was always it's history. Never had an interest in wiping out so much of that for the sake of it
New 52 was an unmitigated disaster. I read some of the New 52 and hated it.
The fact that nothing ever ends. Regardless of what big thing happens in an event comic these days you can bet that nothing will ever stick, because they have to make sure **** keeps going. This leads to bullshit like bloated continuities, Status Quo is God, less risk-taking, etc. Nature of the beast I suppose, but I haven't been too interested in superhero comics for a while, at least not from the big 2.
To some degree that was our (fans) own fault. We don't want to leave these worlds that we've loved, we want them to grow and change with us, but that's not a reasonable ask to make of a corporate publisher.
Prior to the mid-1960s, it didn't matter as much because most fans migrated out of the hobby with some fond memories about the time they hit puberty. After the mid-1960s, a larger percent of the fans began to hang on longer, and began wanting more out of their stories. But those superhero settings only have so much elasticity to them if the brands are going to continue to sell.
IMO, this was the tragedy of Wolfman and Perez' New Teen Titans. It was mind-blowing in the early 1980s, because they were showing change and progression. They were allowed to get away with it because Teen Titans was considered a failed property at the time the experimental work on them began. Looking back, it seems obvious they weren't going to be able to keep that up forever; their own success was bound to make the publisher want to freeze them in amber at some point.
That's why I loved Thunderbolts, it wasn't afraid to drastically change and truly re-invent and grow. Also, the cast was by-and-large just Thunderbolts based, so they didn't have confusing stories. I think allowing characters to be in multiple comics (and therefore jumble up the continuity AND run out of stories quicker) really was a mistake. If you only use them regularly in one comic, you can get decades out of them.
"We are Shakespeare. We are Michelangelo. We are Tchaikovsky. We are Turing. We are Mercury. We are Wilde. We are Lincoln, Lorca, Leonardo da Vinci. We are Alexander the Great. We are Fredrick the Great. We are Rustin. We are Addams. We are Marsha! Marsha Marsha Marsha! We so generous, we DeGeneres. We are Ziggy Stardust hooked to the silver screen. Controversially we are Malcolm X. We are Plato. We are Aristotle. We are RuPaul, god dammit! And yes, we are Woolf."
Constant reboots, popular charecters thrown to the side for charecters that fit the current social status quo. Change for the sake of change. The fact that about 10 or 11 years ago we as DC fans finally had Dick Grayson as Batman, a justice League that was made of nothing but legacy charecters. This was great. Then wahm! Nu52. Now don't get me wrong ,I support ed this endever whole heartedly, only to be mostly dissapointed. As far as Marvel is concerned, well..... while I've picked up a title here and there. Really haven't been a fan of them since the 1990's.
I found that reboots can be a positive. For example, the Legion of Super-Heroes. As soon as they start to get dull they get rebooted and new directions can be explored. Bad reboots, however, are terrible like what JMS did to Wonder Woman.
What really puts me off every time is when a sideband like Squadron Supreme or Watchmen or something else, that stands great on its own, gets incorporated into the main universe.
In case of Watchmen I liked it, but in the end I prefer it on its own.
I’ve drifted towards reading genre prose for 90 percent plus of my reading...fantasy, SF, historical fiction, crime. There the fictional worlds created by the authors tend to be more logically consistent than the mish mash fictional universes that both Marvel and DC have become.
I don’t think the big two universes cope with big emotional or political issues well...no long term reader can take a death or retirement story seriously, for example.
But at same time main DC and Marvel don’t seem to me to be as good at light hearted escapist fantasy as they were.
So odd times that I do fancy reading some super hero comics...it makes much more sense to dip into Marvel and DC’s back catalogue than read current output. (That also means I have much better control at avoiding things like unwelcome writer and artist changes...in my last few years of following regular comics got fed up of sudden changes to writers and artists.)