@Christopher..."They" is Joe Q let's not kid ourselves here, this was his mandate from the start. I seriously doubt that he even considered altering or having this just be a storyline for a temporary basis of time,the way he's talked about it and rammed it down fans throats for the past three years would indicate this.
Of course you're right about that, but my point is that, in something like ongoing series fiction, no creator can ever be absolutely certain that his or her plans won't have to be reversed sometime in the future. So even if your
intention is to make a new change permanent, it's just common sense to have a backup plan in case things don't go the way you intend. Think of it like the lifeboats on a ship or the airbags on a car. You don't want to use them, you'll hopefully never have to use them, but it's still common sense to include them just in case. So there's no conflict between intending a story change to be permanent and including a vague possibility that it could be reversed. In something as open-ended and unpredictable as serial fiction, it's always a good idea to keep your options open.
On the other hand, just because Quesada is hinting
now that there may be a chance of Peter and MJ getting married again, that doesn't necessarily mean he had any such intention in mind when OMD came out. If anything, it sounds to me like he's walking back some of his original intentions in response to audience dissatisfaction. People hated the deal with the devil, so he created a new story that said, "Hey, guess what, Peter didn't make a deal with the devil after all." A lot of people also reacted badly to breaking up the marriage, so now he's appeasing them by hinting that the marriage could possibly come back. Maybe he didn't have any such back doors or retcons in mind when he started this process, but he's working them in now.
As I mentioned before in this thread this is his mark and legacy on the character...unraveling it makes it look like a joke in the first place.
To me, it simply makes it look like it didn't work out as he'd hoped and he's having second thoughts. That's hardly the first time in Spidey history that a bad idea has been retconned. In the Clone Saga, Ben Reilly was revealed to be the real Peter Parker, and that was supposed to be a permanent change, but it was so poorly received that it was retconned away and the original Peter was confirmed to have been the real one. The John Byrne reboot of Spidey's origins was so badly received that it was abandoned without any explanation for the reversal; it was just treated as though it had never happened. This is something that happens a lot in comics -- new things get tried, they're badly received, and so they get retconned away. There's nothing new or unique about what seems to be happening here.
I agree with most of your post (this is becoming a scary trend Christopher, me agreeing with you).
