Well, I wouldn't call them outright villains but enough with this justification as if mutants haven't had island nations before in worse scenarios.Yeah, People who say they are villains now I think are missing the point of this era. With so much destruction that have come their way, the X-men just saying "Let's start our own island and be done with it".
Integrating with the larger World hasn't worked out for them because folks will literally build giant death robots to stop them.
Now if someone attacks them, it's a declaration of war. Essentially giving individual mutants more defence when they feel threatened.
The whole death and rebirth actually plays into a very interesting concept that X-Force has touched upon (and apparently Way of X deals with) and that's the trauma of dying. There's also that we, as readers know so little about it. Are they clones? Do they still contain the "Soul" of the mutant?
I think the phrases these books have also have some greater importance. "Dawn of X" is self explanatory, it's essentially the start of things, they are coming and this the beginning.
The connotations behind it are rather neutral.
However reign, which is believe is where a lot of the greater conflicts start to arise, has negative connotations. Reign sounds very authoritarian. Reign is a very hard sounding word and this is where we see the mutants expanding into other areas.
We know that Sword will have some kind of conflict with Guardians (see Guardians of the Galaxy #14 solicitations) and we've already seen them come into conflict with the fantastic Four.
The problem isn't them having their own island, but I can see the issues arising when they start to get too cocky and start to get close to other people's spaces.
They helped out during King in Black and Empyre, but how much of that was to protect themselves?
So far, every story (at least the ones I've read) have been about Mutants protecting themselves.
It's not like in prior stories where they've stopped another mutant from attacking civilization.
The only instance of that was way back in HOXPOX.
But honestly, I'm happy the mutants have their own sex island. Live free mutants.