Alfred and Gordon are essential, too, but Robin is, to me, the incarnation of Batman's inspirational potential, rather than two father-figure types. He's creating a new family, building something. I dunno. It's tricky, trying to articulate why I love different parts of the Batfamily or Bat-structure, but when Chuck Dixon articulated what Denny O'Neil told him when he first was offered the Robin title in the early 1990s, and Dixon said he didn't like Robin, he said that O'Neil told him basically what I said about Batman by himself being just a crazy man in a weird outfit, and that's stuck with me ever since.
There's only a few craft moments where I think Tynion really fell down, and I blame a lot of that on Metal and then prepping for Justice League. I think the way he tied almost everything (except Cass) together in the last arc is fantastic.
I mean, I know a lot of people are still mad at Helena Bertinelli for what it did to Helena Wayne. So I can see it from that perspective, too.
There's a way to retcon that is respectful - which I would say is a lot of what happened with Rebirth - and a bad way, which is a lot of what I think happened in the n52. The Villains Month Bane story, what Morrison did to Talia's backstory with Bruce, what happens nearly every time a new writer gets onto Wonder Woman - that's all pretty disrespectful.
A lot of it does come down to "is this a retcon that makes something I didn't like better, or something that I didn't care about cool" or "is this a retcon that makes something I loved bad, or something I cared about uncool". So it can be intensely personal.