Well, in those eras, the infrastructure of Marvel was very different. it was still a holdover from the days in which Stan Lee ran everything single-handedly, so you had a single Editor (what we would think of today as an Editor in Chief) and a couple of Assistant Editors overseeing the whole of the line. And many of the senior writers, those who had been on staff at Marvel, functioned as independent editors themselves. So the creators would often be making up their stories almost on the fly, with nobody looking over their shoulders or that they needed to check in with especially. And there were good sides and bad sides to this, but the bad ultimately outweighed the good. So when Jim Shooter came in as EIC in the late 1970s, he began to change the structure, building up a line of Editors to handle the specifics of the various books in house and putting an end to the writer-editor concept. This caused a lot of bad feelings at the time, but was certainly the right move in terms of righting the Marvel of the period.