Having characters "belong" to several teams is stupid from a story telling point of view, since it heightens the unreality of the setting and prevents readers of normal intelligence and psychology from being drawn into the tale sufficiently to enjoy it. Also it ignores the characters themselves as anything more than brands, since it rejects any idea of consistent characterisation in favour of merely shoehorning them into ailing books to prop them up. It makes the occasional member swap of the 1970s and the Avengers-Defenders dichotomy utterly pointless. The Defenders were outsiders, albeit in some cases cosmically powerful ones. The Avengers had a charter, elitist cliques, expensive headquarters provided by billionaire playboy Tony Stark, and the rest. They were in some respects almost the UN or the Ambassadors to the normal world for superheroes- Avengers Mansion was somewhere in New York that people could actually visit if they had a problem.
Current Marvel jas been excessively concerned with a handful of people as writers, none of whom have the basic understanding of heroism or values that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby inherently did.
Reading Jim Shooter's blog, the thing that strikes me about him is how antiquated his value system for comics seems in comparison with the bizarre insular thinking going on at Marvel / Disney and DC / Warner.
