This is probably an age thing (on my part) more than anything else, since my first exposure to Batman in comics was Post-Crisis. I didn't finally read anything Pre-Crisis with Jason Todd until about two years ago. I read the whole Nocturna storyline. I thought it was pretty good. Nocturna made for an interesting foil, in an unconventional way. And I like the Pre-Crisis versions of Jason Todd and Bullock.
I think I'm a bit older than you are (I'm about to turn 51(!)), so I was reading the Pre-Crisis Jason Todd stuff in real time. And yeah, it's pretty obvious that when Gerry Conway created Jason, he was basically meant to be Dick Grayson in everything but name. He came from a circus aerialist family like Dick, and they were even named the Flying Todds!
Jason basically came about because Gerry Conway wanted Dick Grayson/Robin back in the
Batman books but Marv Wolfman & George Pérez were having great success with Dick over in
The New Teen Titans, DC's top seller at the time. So ultimately DC editorial just decided to split the character in two. So Marv & George kept Dick Grayson, had him quit being Robin, and came up with a new identity for him, Nightwing. And Gerry created a new Robin for the Batman books to use. (Conway ended up leaving the Bat books just as Batman took Jason on as a new partner, though, so most of Jason's initial development fell to Doug Moench.)
Post-Crisis, they decided to give Jason a unique origin that wasn't just a duplicate of Dick Grayson's, so then Bat-writer Max Alan Collins decided to give him the same basic origin as Junior Tracy from the
Dick Tracy comic strip, a street kid adopted by the hero. And then, gradually, bit by bit, Jason became more jerky and the readers turned against him. (I feel like this was mostly because of Jim Starlin, who disliked Robin and wanted him out of the book so he could write solo Batman stories.) DC came up with
the 1-900 number stunt to finally deal with the problem the character had become, and they were very surprised when the readers actually voted to kill Jason off by a 72 vote margin (I called twice to let him live, personally). It got DC a WAVE of bad publicity too, as the general public in 1988 had no idea that Robin was no longer the fellow that Burt Ward played on TV in the 1960s. And so DC quickly began to create a new Robin that readers would like more, mostly for merchandising reasons. And they were much more successful with Tim Drake.
Nocturna was never one of my favorites, and she was basically dropped from the Bat books because longtime Batman editor Denny O'Neil disliked the character, too. (Doug Moench told me this directly when I interviewed him about 10 years back.) Bullock is awesome, though!
Anyway. Sorry for the Bat Digression, folks! I just find the Jason Todd Robin story fascinating.
