Don't get me wrong, not every decision Brevoort has made recently has been a terrible one.
Heck, not every decision you assume he's made, good or bad, is necessarily his decision, either, any more than the editors who worked for Jim Shooter got to make all the decisions themselves.
Perhaps my view of the editor's job is off, however, I was under the impression it was the editor's job to say "no" at times and have the final decision over the product he is responsible for producing.
Your view is off. The job of an editor isn't to say no, or to say yes, or to guard continuity, or to flout it, or any other set of things various readers want to see at different times. All of those things can (and sometimes are) part of the job, but they're not the job.
The job of an editor is to:
1. Make the books sell.
2. Deliver the books his employers want.
3. Deliver the books on time, to the extent that it fits with 1 and 2.
I haven't been reading NEW AVENGERS, but from what I read about it, it seems that Tom is delivering pretty much exactly the book his bosses want, making them sell, and bringing them out on time to the best of his ability and within the constraints of the assignment (i.e., you wait for Bendis, you work around Epting and Grummett, etc.).
While I will grant you that it is entirely possible that Shooter's comments about his experiences may, by the very nature of their source be biased and self-serving (particularly about his experiences with Defiant and Valiant, business deals that sound fishy) nonetheless, some of his career choices have been very wise and I agree with them - particularly in instances where he tells the writers "no."
Virtually every editor has told a writer "no" at some point in a way you'd agree with. Not just Jim, but editors you'd overall despise, too. And there are decisions that you almost undoubtedly wouldn't agree with, like Jim's reported plan to kill off all the Stan Lee versions of the characters and replace them with new versions initiated by him -- a story that Jim denies, but which I've heard about from enough sources to believe is rooted in something. Or Jim deciding that the Avengers should be Marvel's big guns, and throwing out the Vision, Wanda, Hawkeye, Wonder Man, the Beast and more. And there's the fact that under Shooter, Marvel lost, forced out or chased off Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench, Frank Miller, John Byrne, Gene Colan, George Perez and others, to the point that one DC exec once told me that DC viewed Jim as their greatest asset, and the whole DC boom of the Eighties couldn't have taken place without him.
But I'm not saying Jim's a bad guy, a bad writer or a bad editor -- everyone makes good decisions from time to time; everyone makes bad ones. How it balances out is up to the individual observer. Heck, I'd like to see that last Legion story, too -- and I'm the guy who pitched Tom on contacting Jim to do a Korvac follow-up in the first place, so I'd have liked to see that work out. [And come to think of it, that's another nail in the coffin of the idea that Tom killed Jim's comeback story -- there wouldn't have been a project for Jim to quit if Tom hadn't contacted him and asked him to do it to begin with.]
But Jim has a long, long record of painting himself as a put-upon genius unfairly booted around by the other guy, whoever the other guy was at the time. If you believe his interviews, you're getting a very, very one-sided picture.
kdb