JB: "... at a convention in Atlanta, at dinner with Frank Miller and his girlfriend, Dick Giordano offered me..."

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You saw what I wrote?

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Reverse the order and you come closer to the mark. The primary reason -- what you call tertiary -- was fannish snobbery. "Oh, well, WE have been reading these books for YEARS so WE understand the complexities of the multiverse, but NEW READERS would be totally lost!" I heard variations on that for about a decade before CRISIS happened.

Sad thing was, nobody seems to have considered the simple expedient of NOT TALKING ABOUT THE OTHER EARTHS.* Again, the fannish mindset prevailed, and it all had to be "fixed" in a STORY. A story that, ultimately, proved even MORE off-putting to potential "new readers."

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* The way I simply made no references to Reed and Ben having fought in WW2.

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When Robin was introduced the companies were still being run by people who were old hands at the publishing game, and who understood the rules, even if they were unwritten. Readers, too, understood how the game was played. It was not until they began to morph into "Fans" that the problems began to show themselves.

Robin, when I "met" him, circa 1956, was about ten years old. No kind of "realism" was forced into the character -- if anyone expressed concern that a ten year old child should be put into the kind of dangerous situations Batman faced, those complaints did not see print. And most people were not likely to worry about it, anyway. Comics were fantasy entertainment, not snapshots of reality. (Kids really didn't tie towels around their necks and jump off the garage roof trying to fly like Superman. They (I) understood it wasn't in the cape!)

When the Teen Titans were introduced, Robin aged subtly. He'd been a "tween" for a couple of decades, but now he was officially a teenager. Still, from the way he and the other Titans were drawn, it was easy to assume they were just barely teenagers, no more than thirteen.

But DC editorial offices have long had the problem of not understanding that they are part of a greater whole, and things that happen in one title can ripple out to impact on other, seemingly unconnected titles. So when the Batman office decided to restore Batman to his "roots," principally by getting rid of Robin, they packed him off to college. (Death was not yet the fetish it would become, for fans or pros.) But college meant a considerable jump in age, since apparently nobody thought Dick was genius enough to start college when he was thirteen.

Dick becoming roughly eighteen meant the other Titans became, instantly, the same age. And -- and here's the part everyone at DC seems to have trouble with -- everybody else aged the same amount! And when other kids were brought in, and they too aged, the effect became cumulative.

When I was working on WONDER WOMAN, I had Nightwing appear. I asked, simply for my own frame of reference, how old he was supposed to be. I was told Dick was at that time 28. Which meant he had aged 18 years since becoming Robin -- and so had Batman. And Superman. And Lois Lane. Hard to maintain that Superman is eternally 29 when 18 years have passed "on camera."

And all they'd ever had to do was not age the characters.

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From what I have been told, that "origin" came about thru a cascade of errors, the first being the assumption by the creators of the Teen Titans that Wonder Girl was Wonder Woman's kid partner. (The lack of communication between editorial fiefdoms at DC in those days was staggering!) Wonder Girl was, of course, a younger version of Diana (as was Wonder Tot) created thru Amazon magic.

So that had to be "fixed..."