It's hard to fault any of the creatives on the books for what happens in late 90s X-titles because it was infamously editorially driven, but wow it's rough.
I'd heard that the Kelly and Seagle run and X-Men and Uncanny X-Men after Scott Lobdell leaves is pretty good, but I don't think it works at all. Seagle especially seems to be constantly doing tie ins to his Alpha Flight run to the detriment of his X-book. They start a bunch of plot threads that all get shut down so editorial can relaunch with a new team that integrates the fan favorites from the recently cancelled Excalibur, which was itself maybe a good decision but in effect it means the Kelly/Seagle X-Men run is just two separates series of fits and starts that go nowhere, because they're pushed out soon after. Maybe reading what comes after this will make me regret my words and deeds, but if so wow this is going to be a rough period to get through. I just can't agree with the assessment that this is a bright spot in a bad era, unless it gets a lot worse.
A few years ago Maggot was a meme character on Twitter and people pretended to be big fans of the character, and it got him some modern day cameos. I figured there was maybe some period of appearances that I missed where he got to do anything at all, but looking into it basically all of his appearances occur during this run, and he has two character traits: (1) Constantly hits on women in an annoying way and (2) every line of dialogue contains Afrikaans slang exclusively written by writers who aren't familiar with Afrikaans slang. Maybe it's accurate for all I know, but I'm skeptical and it's really over the top, making Claremont accents seem subtle by comparison. He's an interesting in theory when introduced, but no one ever does anything with him or defines who he is, and then they kick him off the book, and that's basically all his appearances, ever.
Generation-X feels like it got a mandate to become a children's book. In itself this is fine I guess, but I don't think Larry Hama made it work during his run and Jay Faeber doesn't seem to be doing much better. Again there's the issue of completely dropped threads during changeover. Hama introduces this new character named Gaia to be a major story focus, and granted she's arguably a bit of a Poochie, but then right after Faeber takes over she has an issue where she basically has a Poochie exit, getting a brief scene saying, "I don't think I belong here" and that is apparently her final appearance, ever.
As a general diagnosis for this era, it feels like everyone is still writing in the old Marvel paradigm, as if they'll get to be the next Claremont who sticks around on a title for two decades, or at least get something like Hama's run on Wolverine, but that time is gone. So, the effect is that you get a series of huge shakeups that last maybe 7 issues before either editorial orders another huge shakeup or a new writer comes in who ignores what just happened, or both. This general situation unfortunately persists into modern day, but at least now no one expects to get more than 4 or 5 issues or two years if they're lucky, so they write stories that fit their potential scope. But in the late 90s X-titles there's this constant mismatch between creative team ambition and editorial and author shakeups that means nothing goes anywhere and no new plot or character will ever matter.
