Originally Posted by
Sutekh
I think the major drawback to Forge's power level is that he needs time and material to do anything.
Sure, if I've got a problem that needs to be solved next week, and a bunch of Shiar technology lying around for him to strip for parts, he's great, but when stuff happens *now* and we don't have a small country's defense budget worth of tools and tech lying around, I'd rather have Jonathan the Actual Badger.
Narratively he suffers from the fact that the X-Men have never had a trouble farting out whatever machinery they need, without him, whether it be because Xavier himself can create awesome tech (like Cerebro), or other X-geeks can do so (like Beast), or they revert to using Shiar tech, so he was utterly superfluous before he was even introduced. They already had all the impossible tech the narrative called for.
Forge being able to make essentially anything gave him the mutant power to be redundant, since they already were able to have any gadget the writer wanted them to have.
Only know he's kind of a nuisance, since writers have to come up with lame reasons why Forge *can't* just create a 'mutant un-cure' that gives 'cured' mutants back their mutant powers, or a special suit or 'gene-lock' serum that makes the wearer immune to the ubiquitous mutant-power-dampening weapons that everyone and their dog has these days.
He kind of got written into corner right from his creation, as a deus ex machina to explain why Storm was depowered for a bit, but it more narrative trouble than he's worth, it seems, since so few want to really use him and most writers seem to shrug and stick him in Krakoa's basement 'inventing stuff' that mysteriously never amounts to a fat stack of jack.