Your take's accurate, and I think it's part of why the comic market crashed around that time. Honestly, you had things like Amalgam comics, you had DC's Tangent series (when they reimagined each character for no apparent reason for a few issues. Wonder Woman was a geeky green alien with a big stick, for example)
The eighties were good to comics. The nineties were much less so. Thus far, this decade, we seem to be in the "decade of Events," between Civil War, House of M, World War Hulk, Infinite Crisis, One Year Later, Disassembled, and probably a half dozen I'm forgetting.......